Cuban Cinema

Cultural Studies in the Americas

Edited by George Ydice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores

Volume 14 Cuban Cinema

Michael Chanan

Volume 13 Ethnography at the Border

Pablo Vila, editor

Volume 12 Critical Latin American and Latino Studies

Juan Poblete, editor

Volume 11 Mexican Masculinities

Robert McKee Irwin

Volume 10 Captive Women: Oblivion and Memory in Argentina

Susana Rotker

Volume 9 Border Women: Writing from La Frontera

Debra A. Castillo and Mara Socorro Tabuenca Crdoba

Volume 8 Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean
Gerard Aching

Volume 7 Scenes from Postmodern Life

Beatriz Sarlo

Volume 6 Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conicts

Nstor Garca Canclini

Volume 5 Music in Cuba

Alejo Carpentier

Volume 4 Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies

Robin Truth Goodman

Volume 3 Latin Americanism

Romn de la Campa

Volume 2 Disidentications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics

Jos Esteban Muoz

Volume 1 The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the
U.S.Mexico Border
Claire F. Fox
 Cuban Cinema

Michael Chanan

Cultural Studies of the Americas, Volume 14

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided
for the publication of this book by the McKnight Foundation.

Copyright 2004 by Michael Chanan

The rst edition of this book was published in 1985 as The Cuban Image: Cinema
and Cultural Politics in Cuba by the British Film Institute, 127 Charing Cross
Road, London WC2H 0EA; it was published in the United States by Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. Copyright 1985 by Michael Chanan.

Illustrations from Cuban lms are reproduced courtesy of the Instituto Cubano de
Arte e Industria Cinematogrcos (icaic).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chanan, Michael.
[Cuban image]
Cuban cinema / Michael Chanan.
p. cm. (Cultural studies of the Americas ; 14)
Originally published: The Cuban image. London : British Film Institute ;
Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 1985.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3423-8 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8166-3424-6 (PB : alk.
paper)
1. Motion picturesCubaHistory. 2. Motion picturesSocial
aspectsCuba. I. Title. II. Series.
PN1993.5.C8C48 2003
791.43'097291dc22 2003020074

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Luis Espinal and Miguel Cabezas,
and for Margaret and Duncan
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Preface ix

Coppola on Cuban Film xv

Introduction: Forty Years On 1

PART I
Before the Revolution: Cinema at the Margins

ONE
For the First Time 25

TWO
Back to the Beginning 38

THREE
The Nineteenth-Century Heritage 56

FOUR
Melodrama and White Horses 68

FIVE
Amateurs and Militants 90

PART II
The Revolution Takes Power: A Cinema of Euphoria

SIX
The Coming of Socialism 117

SEVEN
The First Feature Films 144
EIGHT
Beyond Neorealism 163

NINE
The Documentary in the Revolution 184
 TEN
The Revolution in the Documentary 218

ELEVEN
The Current of Experimentalism 247

TWELVE
Four Films 273

THIRTEEN
Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 305

FOURTEEN
One Way or Another 332

PART III
New Generations: A Cinema of Readjustment

FIFTEEN
Reconnecting 355

SIXTEEN
Return of the Popular 395

SEVENTEEN
Wonderland 444

Notes 497

Distribution Information 519

Index of Film Titles 521

Index of Names 529

 Preface

The rst edition of this book was published in 1985 and covered the
history of Cuban cinema up to 1979. This new edition, which brings
the story current to the turn of the twenty-rst century, is separated not
just by the passage of years but by a change of historical epoch. When
the book rst appeared, the Cold War was still in full swing, neoliberal-
ism only in its rst phase, and revolutionary Cuba had been boosted by
the triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Cuban lms enjoyed a repu-
tation around the world as the model of a cinema that conjoined polit-
ical commitment and bold aesthetic novelty. At the end of the century,
the Soviet bloc and the Sandinistas had both passed into history, revo-
lutionary socialism had been discredited by an unthinkable historical
reversal, and the talk was all of globalization. Yet socialist Cuba is still
there, having survived the severest of peacetime economic crises with-
out becoming a failed state. Its lm industry has suered contraction
and no longer attracts the same attention abroad, but it continues to pro-
duce lms that deserve to be known far more widely. I hope this new
edition will contribute to such an end.
Although Cuba was almost bankrupted by the collapse of the Soviet
Union, on which the island depended for three decades, nevertheless
Fidel Castro and the Communist Party remain in powerwidely criti-
cized for not giving up but also admired, if sometimes grudgingly, for
the very same thing, both in Latin America and beyond. This book is
oered in the conviction that Cuban cinema, even in its weakened con-
dition, provides primary evidence of the complex factors at play in this

ix
 x Preface

extraordinary situation, and that fullling this role is what nourishes its
aesthetic and political fascination.
In order to reect the distance between these two moments, I have
replaced the original foreword with a new introduction, which surveys
the forty years of Cuban cinema from the triumph of the Revolution in
1959 to the end of the century. This is followed by the revised text of the
rst edition, divided into two parts, covering the years before the Revolu-
tion and then the rst twenty years after it (195979). Corrections have
been kept to a minimum; a few paragraphs have been removed, and
one or two added for clarication, but the accounts of the lms have
not changed. The chapters new to this edition comprise Part III, which
begins with a retrospective survey of the rst twenty years after the Revo-
lution, then picks up where Part I leaves o. This gives readers, both
new and previous, several possible routes through the text.
I have not amended the accounts of the lms from the rst edition, but
I do not suppose that my readings are in any way conclusive. On the con-
trary, I commend the remarks of the Cuban critic Juan Antonio Garca
Borrero on Toms Gutirrez Aleas Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories
of Underdevelopment, 1968) in his Critical Guide to Cuban Fiction Cin-
ema. On seeing the lm again, Garca Borrero speaks of the way it gave
him the unexpected impression of never having seen it before: I fol-
lowed it conscious of the order of the scenes that would appear before
me, only that now, the density of these sequences revealed new mean-
ings, new possibilities of interpretation, readings never envisaged.1 This
is not just to say that in Cuba a lm like this remains relevant many
years after it was made, but that new interpretations are produced by
the changing contours of history and thus the situation of the viewer.
When I rst introduced this book, I wrote of my own situation as
author as the function of a double movement. Having already spent
time in Latin America before rst going to Cuba in 1979, I knew some-
thing about the asymmetrical nature of the cultural distances contained
in political geography, of the invisible divide to be crossed when travel-
ing from the rst world to the third, which only fully registered not on
going but on returning. Anthropologist friends reported the same expe-
rience on returning from eldwork. Leaving behind the smell and the
taste of the country of sojourn and coming back to ones own, one felt
disoriented and set apart by the encounter with the immediate reality of
underdevelopment. My rst visit to Cuba also taught me something
 Preface xi

else. The strange thing about that month was that because my subject of
investigation was cinema, I saw both more and less than another visitor
might in the same period of time. Less because most days I was sitting
in a viewing theater, more because I was watching the country go by on
the screen. You couldnt possibly visit so many places, meet so many
people, and see so many facets of their lives in the space of a month in
any other way; lm transports you and condenses time. The experience
taught me much about the paradoxical qualities of the medium and
made me intensely aware of the space of viewing itself. I realized that
the lm you see depends, among other things, on where you see it. Log-
ically speaking, the lm is exactly the same wherever you watch it, but
the lm you seem to see depends on where that is. Film scholars have
long talked about the way that lm positions the viewer, but this posi-
tion is also aected by the situation of viewing, the historical and geo-
graphical location of the viewer in front of the screen. The projected
image is the same, but the space between the screen and the viewers
eyes is dierent.
I remembered a similar experience Id had years earlier, when I saw a
work of underground cinema, Carolee Schneemans Fuses, rst on a large
screen at the ica (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London and then
not long afterward projected on the wall of her home at a party. I had
not much liked it the rst time, but very much the second, and it seemed
clear to me that this was because of the kind of lm it was: the neutral
dull space of the cinema deadened something in the image, which came
alive on the domestic wall. I felt something similar in Havana: the lms
gave the feeling of being fully at home on these screens.
The thing struck me most vividly two weeks after arriving in Cuba. I
had watched Octavio Cortzars marvelous documentary Hablando de
punto cubano (Speaking of typical Cuban music), which explains a song
form called controversia (controversy), a musical competition in which
singers improvise alternate verses. (I discuss the lm in detail in chapter
13.) After seeing the lm, I wondered to what extent the art was still
alive and what kind of search was required by the lmmakers to nd
these obviously accomplished practitioners. The next day my hosts at
the state lm institute took me to Varadero for a weekend at the seaside.
On the way we stopped for a drink at a beauty spot. It was midafter-
noon, and the only other people in the bar were a group sitting at a
table in the garden at the back; judging by the number of empty beer
 xii Preface

bottles, they had been there a good while. As we sat down we heard
singing, and they gestured for us to come and listen: an older man and a
younger man were engaged in a controversia. There was a cheerful round
of laughter as the older man proclaimed himself the winner, because, he
sang, his opponent had slipped up and used the same word twice in the
same verse. I knew at once the answer to my queries of the previous day
and at the same time became aware of all sorts of other continuities be-
tween what I was seeing on the screen and what lay outside the viewing
theater. This sense of contact with the immediate world from which
Cuban cinema takes its image has served, I hope, to animate this book.
If it hasnt, it is not the fault of the lms.

The foreword to the rst edition included a long list of people who gave
me their help, their time, and their encouragement. I remember rst
those whom time has removed from us: Toms Gutirrez Alea (Titn),
Santiago lvarez, Manuel Octavio Gmez, Hector Garca Mesa, Idalia
Anreus, Adolfo Llaurado, and Jess Daz. Then: Alfredo Guevara, Julio
Garca Espinosa, Humberto Sols, Ambrosio Fornet, Pastor Vega, Jos
Massip, Jorge Fraga, Sergio Giral, Enrique Pineda Barnet, Daysi Granados,
Miguel Torres, Manuel Prez, Octavio Cortzar, Juan Padrn, Gerardo
Chijona, Jorge Pucheux, Eusebio Ortiz, Jos Antonio Gonzlez, Enrique
Colina, Norma Torrado, Francisco Len, Sergio Nez, the late Romualdo
Santos, Mario Piedra, Manuel Pereira, Ral Rodrguez, Roberto Roque,
Jorge Sotolongo, and others. Also the composers Leo Brouwer and
Harold Gramatges. For their help in organizing my activities, Olga Ros,
Mara Padrn, and Lola Calvio; and for their courteous assistance, the
projectionists of icaic and the sta of the library of Cinemateca.
I also beneted from the help of many others. In Cuba (in some cases
between lms during successive Havana lm festivals), and in other
countries, they include Jorge de la Fuente, Nina Menndez, Jean Stubbs,
Pedro Sarduy, Lionel Martin, and Adrienne Hunter; Julianne Burton and
Zuzana Pick; Fernando Birri, Settimio Presutto, Miguel Littn, Patricio
Guzmn, the late Joris Ivens, Jorge Sanjins, Octavio Getino, and Jorge
Denti; Hector Schmucler, Ana Mara Nethol, the late Emilio Garca
Riera, Jorge Ayala Blanco, and Dennis de la Roca; Lino Micciche, Peter
Chappell, John King, Alastair Henessy, the late Nissa Torrents, Robin
Blackburn, Angela Martin, Anne Head, Olivia Harris, Alan Fountain, Rod
Stoneman, Chris Rodriguez, and people at the South West Arts Weekend
 Preface xiii

School on Cuban Cinema in 1982. Also the late Simon Hartog for draw-
ing my attention to a number of bibliographical sources, and Ed Bus-
combe, Georey Nowell-Smith, and others at the British Film Institute.
Material from the rst edition previously appeared in the form of arti-
cles and essays in a number of places, including Framework, Areito, and
Third World Aairs 1985, and in Guerres Rvolutionnaires, Histoire et
cinma, edited by Svlvie Dallet (Paris: ditions lHarmattan, 1984). The
bulk of the material in chapter 10 previously appeared in Santiago lvarez,
BFI Dossier 2 (1980).
For the second edition, I am indebted rst to friends in England and
the United States who encouraged me to take on the task. The new pages
draw on conversations over the years at dierent times and in dierent
countries with Titn, Julio Garca Espinosa, Ambrosio Fornet, and Jess
Daz; and with Paolo Antonio Parangua, Chuck Kleinhans, Julia Lesage,
John Hess, Jorge Runelli, and Haim Bresheeth.
In Cuba, for once again generously contributing their time and en-
couragement, I thank Ambrosio Fornet, Julio Garca Espinosa, Pastor
Vega, Fernando Prez, Rigoberto Lpez, Orlando Rojas, Eduardo del
Llano, Humberto Sols, Rolando Daz, Enrique Colina, Mirta Ibarra,
Toms Piard, and Enrique Pineda Barnet. I am especially indebted to
Juan Antonio Garca Borrero for kindly giving me a prepublication
copy of his excellent Critical Dictionary of Cuban Fiction Cinema, 1910
1998, which has made writing the new chapters so much easier. A num-
ber of people, in addition to icaic, gave me copies of lms on video. I
owe special thanks at icaic to Ana Busquets, Olga Outerio, and Ivan
Giroud, and thanks to Andrew Paxman of Variety for that photocopy.
Some of the new material in this edition had its rst outing at Latin
American Cinema in the 1990s, a conference at Trinity and All Saints
College, Leeds, England, in 1996; at a colloquium on Latin American
cinema at Tel Aviv University in 1998; and at the Latin American Studies
Association conference at the University of Liverpool in 1998. My presen-
tation at the rst of these events was published in Leeds Iberian Papers
(1997).
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the
United Kingdom and to the University of the West of England for the
funds that enabled me to carry out research on two visits to Havana, in
December 1998 and December 2000.
Bristol, England, December 2003
This page intentionally left blank
 Coppola on Cuban Film

On December 2, 1975, Robert Scheer interviewed Francis Ford Coppola

in San Francisco about the lmmakers recent trip to Cuba.

Were you able to see Cuban lms down there?

Any lms we wanted to see. We would just sit in the screening room
and they would run anything we wanted.

What did you think of them?

I thought they were very good. I have been traveling around and I know
very well the pain of a country like Australia thats a wealthy civilized
place and yet has no lm industry, because its cheaper for them to buy
our old television shows and our old movies. You see them struggling to
have a little bit of a lm thing. Yet here you have Cuba, which is a small
place by comparison, and they have healthy, real, ambitious lms.

Are they doing experimental things?

A person who considers himself an artist approaches a socialist society
worrying about, well, the art has to be really simple and follow a certain
line and make a certain point, but my impression was that theres a lot
of latitude. The Cuban authority acknowledges the complexity of the
human experience and their lms explore that. My rst impression when
I saw Memories of Underdevelopment years ago was that it was complex
and had dierent shades of feelings about the Revolution. They ac-
knowledge that. Theyre very eloquent about it. Theyre not pretending

xv
 xvi Coppola on Cuban Film

that its just childs play to put together this new kind of society; its
really hard. And for all their many successes, theyve had many failures.
But they feel theyre right, so its worth pursuing it.
They know that its hard on people: the man at the mental institution
says that the incidence of neurosis is much higher than before the Revo-
lution. They are very honest about the diculties of creating the social-
ist societypeople rethinking questions of property, the fact that youre
not rewarded monetarily. They have a very elaborate system of compe-
tition that does reward workers materially. If you do better at your job
than the next person, you get to buy the washing machine. The lowest-
paid person might make $150 a month and Fidel makes $700 a month.
So, I mean, there are some dierences in pay. We asked most of the
smart-ass questions. For example, lets say you dont want to be a street
cleaner anymore. How do you get out of it? And the key word was edu-
cation. If youre a street cleaner and you want to be a draftsman or an
electronics engineer, you have the opportunity to study three hours a
day; you dont get paid any less. The state encourages it. Its made avail-
able to them and they are not docked in pay. That, to me, is a really ex-
citing idea.

Did you ask questions about the problem of artistic freedom?

Yes. No one is permitted to criticize the government, other than through
the channels that are provided for them. If youre a worker or if youre a
writer, you can do it in your various workers groups. In a factory they
get together a couple of nights a week and discuss problemshow
to make things better, whats unfair, and stu like that. So, in other
words, there are channels that allow you not to criticize the idea of the
society but to gure out how to make it better. I like the honesty of it.
They say no, you cannot criticize the governmentthat freedom, no,
you dont have.
Here in America you can write or say anything you want, and many
people in Cuba are very impressed when you tell them this. They are
surprised when they see something like Godfather II. They wonder, How
can you make a lm that says nice things about our Revolution? But
the truth is, I believe, that the freedoms we have here are possible be-
cause they do not even come close to jeopardizing the real interests that
govern our country. If there were someone who really came close to
jeopardizing those interests, I believe our freedoms would vanish, one
 Coppola on Cuban Film xvii

way or the other. If there were a man, a political candidate, who was
elected to oce and began implementing real programs that were counter
to the big interests, there would be a coup or a murder or whatever was
necessary.
In Cuba they dont even have the illusion of that kind of political free-
dom. Its as though theyre saying, Our Revolution is too fragile, it has
too many enemies, it is too dicult to pull o to allow forces inside or
outside to work to counter it. I understand the implications of what Im
saying, the dangers. But I put it to you: if they are rightif their society
is truly beautiful and honest and worthwhilethen it is worth protect-
ing, even with this suspension of freedom. In Chile, that newborn, elected
society was not protected in this way, and so it was destroyed. Ironically,
the government that replaced it is not taking any chances and is control-
ling the press and opposition in a way that Allende did not.

It seems that what youre saying is that in Cuba, for instance, people sud-
denly had the freedom to do something very positive, like create a mental
institution or a school, which in some sense is a freedom we dont have.
Basically our freedom is still limited freedom.
We dont have the freedom to live in a society that is healthy. That is real
freedom. We dont have the freedom to live in a society that takes care
of people.
This page intentionally left blank
 INTRODUCTION
Forty Years On

Early in 1998, an extraordinary situation unfolded in Havana that would

demonstrate that almost forty years since the Revolution of 1959 and
the creation of a state lm institute, Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria
Cinematogrcos (icaic; Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry),
cinema in Cuba continued to be a highly charged political issue. Fidel
Castro, in the closing speech of the February session of the National
Assembly, raised a series of questions about the power of Hollywood
and the huge budgets employed to ensure that Hollywood movies con-
quered screens throughout the world; he cited the example of Titanic,
whose young star, Leonardo DiCaprio, had been visiting Cuba. The
Cuban leader had spoken in this vein once before, at the awards cere-
mony of the Havana Film Festival in 1985, when he talked of the struggle
of Latin American lmmakers to compete, even in their own countries.
This time, however, he shifted gear, and launched into an attack on dis-
contents in Cuba who captured international attention by making lms
that, instead of celebrating the positive achievements of the Revolution,
proered negative criticismsor worse, were counterrevolutionary. He
gave the example of a lm that he said hed been told about, in which a
corpse was transported from Guantnamo to Havana, or the other way
around, he didnt know which. His listeners were shocked to realize that
he was attacking Guantanamera, the last lm of Toms Gutirrez Alea,
Cubas most celebrated lm director, who had died almost two years
earlier. The lm (codirected by Juan Carlos Tabo) is a black comedy in
which an old woman from Havana dies in Guantnamo, at the other

1
 2 Introduction

end of the island, and, because of fuel restrictions, her body is returned
to Havana in a relay of hearses and bureaucratic muddles.
According to reports that circulated later, it was the minister of cul-
ture, Abel Prieto, who rst approached Fidel and asked him if he real-
ized the lm in question was made by Titnthe nickname by which
Alea was universally known. He did not, because he hadnt seen it, and
he was taken aback to discover that hed unwittingly slandered the mem-
ory of a man he had respected. Within a day or two he had sent a message
to Aleas widow, the actress Mirta Ibarra, apologizing for his mistake,
and although the speech had been broadcast as usual on television, it did
not appear in the party newspaper Granma as it would normally have
done (although it was later printed for internal party consumption).1
But the oense continued to rankle, raising its head again a few days
later, when the Cuban leader made an unusual appearance at a meeting
of the National Committee of the Union of Writers and Artists (uneac),
which he didnt normally attend. He spoke about various issues he had
recently been contemplating that also concerned uneac, such as the
defense of national culture in the face of globalization. As the meeting
was about to retire for lunch, the author Senel Pazthe scriptwriter on
Aleas penultimate lm Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, also
codirected by Tabo)got up and asked to speak. Referring to Fidels
words a fortnight earlier, he said that he normally found he agreed with
Fidels opinions, but on the question of Aleas lm, he could not do so.
He was followed by a dozen or so others, some of them lmmakers,
some not. All defended the lm. The lm director Manuel Prez, a
staunch party member, explained that Guantanamera invited its audi-
ence to laugh not against the Revolution, but with it. Another speaker
pointed out that the lm had several readings, which included Aleas
own relationship to death (he was dying from cancer when he made it).
Finally, Fidel asked if there was anyone who held a dierent opinion
about the lm; there was a resounding silence.
Fidel summed up. He had not realized the lm was Titns, and ac-
knowledged that he must have been mistaken about it, since he regarded
Alea as beyond reproach. However, he was concerned that so many lms
produced by the Film Institute, icaic, in recent years had the same ori-
entationthey were too critical, and this, he said, was something that
would have to be discussed with icaics president, Alfredo Guevara. Ac-
cording to an account by the Spanish writer Manuel Vsquez Montalbn,
 Introduction 3

this was part of a general complaint about the defeatism (derrotismo)

that seemed to emanate from the intellectual sector in the years follow-
ing the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.2
The mood of derrotismo was not unique to icaic, nor did complaints
about it originate with Fidel. The same thing was said of the leading
Cuban think tank, the Centro de Estudios de Amrica (cea), two years
earlier, when an orthodox faction within the party central committee
attacked it for thinking too independently.
Alfredo Guevara was an old comrade of Castros from student days
(indeed, Castro has been known to say that it was Alfredo Guevara who
introduced him to Marxism), who in 1991 had returned to the helm of
icaic, which he founded in 1959 and then left in 1981. Guevara now
held discussions with several of the directors, who came up with posi-
tion papers to help him formulate the arguments to present in defense
of icaics policies. He also appeared in a television interview comment-
ing publicly on the issue. The situation, he said, was a mess, and Fidel
had given him the job of explaining things to him. I think that as a re-
sult of this encounter, we Cuban cineasts will be able to prove to the
Comandante en Jefe that we are the same people hes always trusted,
loyal to the Revolution, critics like him, not more critical than him, ca-
pable of holding back, if its necessary to hold back; but not to abandon
our language, because the language of the cinema is either the language
of the cinema or it isnt cinema, and I believe, as Ive said before, that
were on the right road, the road of clarity.3 How to read this comment is
indicated by the way that one of my informants, who saw the interview
on television, remembered it. Ambrosio Fornet, who is both a literary
historian and a screenwriter, remembered Guevara saying that the lan-
guage of cinema and the language of politics were two dierent things,
the two did not always go hand in hand, and sometimes it was necessary
to explain this to the party leaders.4 It was as if, he added, the phoenix
had risen, as if, once morebecause this was a battle that had been
engaged beforeGuevara had won an argument on behalf of the Film
Institutes autonomy, and the lmmakers right to fulll their artistic
vocation, even when this meant taking up a critical position toward the
political establishment.
This book is about the history of these argumentsabout the ori-
gins of the extraordinary role that cinema has played in Cubas Revolu-
tion, and the imperatives that led to the creation of icaic within three
 4 Introduction

months of the seizure of power on January 1, 1959, in the rst decree

about cultural matters issued by the Revolutionary Government. It is
about the battles engaged in the early years under Alfredo Guevaras
leadership against sectarians of both right and left; about the defense of
icaics hard-won autonomy in the early 1970s, the period that Fornet
dubbed the ve grey years (el quinquenio gris); and the crisis occa-
sioned in the early 1980s by the lm Cecilia (directed by Humberto
Sols) when Guevara was ousted. And then the resurgence that followed
the appointment of Julio Garca Espinosa as his successor, until he too
fell victim, ten years later, to attacks by the party faithful on Alicia en el
pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown), a biting satire by Daniel
Daz Torres, which led to Alfredo Guevaras return (until his retirement
in 2000; his replacement, Omar Gonzlez, is the rst head of icaic
who is not a lmmaker, but a cultural functionary, with previous expe-
rience in areas like television and publishing). Not least, it is also about
the struggle to keep the lm institute aoat during the economic collapse
(the Special Period) following the demise of Communism in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union, which propelled the island into deep crisis,
full of social and political tensions; and about the implications of the
so-called New World Order for a tiny but hugely creative and obstinate
group of Caribbean lmmakers who refuse to take the threat of their
demise lying down.
It is also, of course, about the lms themselves, through which these
arguments and battles are projected, where politics, economics, and ide-
ology take on aesthetic form, and enter into dialogue with public con-
sciousness. The lms made in Cuba before the cinema of the Revolution
exploded onto the worlds screens in the 1960s are of little aesthetic im-
port, whatever the delights, mainly musical, they may sometimes con-
tain. The Revolution, however, unleashed among a new generation of
lmmakers a furious creative energy as they turned the cameras on the
process they were living, and told the Cuban peopleand anyone else
who was interestedwho they were and what they were doing. In 1961,
in a famous speech on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion by an army of
expatriate Cubans in the pay of the cia, Castro told everyone that what
they were doing in Cuba was called socialism. The Revolution was car-
ried forward by mass enthusiasm and a powerful sense of direct democ-
racy, but Cuba, rebued and cut o by its domineering neighbor, was
rapidly thrown into the arms of the Soviet Union, which saved the coun-
 Introduction 5

try from economic collapse but enforced on the Revolution the price of
Communist orthodoxy in matters of politics and economics. A series of
events toward the end of the decade, beginning with the death in Bolivia
of Fidel Castros comrade-in-arms Che Guevara, shook the Cuban Revo-
lution hard. If Che represented a powerful vision of revolutionary dedi-
cation and ethics, his departure from the scene saw a shift in the politi-
cal ethos away from the force of revolutionary subjectivity to a greater
sense of realpolitik, and the transition from a utopian socialism to actu-
ally existing socialism. For some commentators, a signal moment oc-
curred in 1968 when Fidel failed to condemn the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia; although the Kremlin didnt much like what he said, it
wasnt what everyone expected him to say. By the end of the 1960s, polit-
ical events had strengthened Moscows inuence, although not without
a polemic over the manuals of Marxism supplied by the Soviet Academy
of Sciences, which ended with the clear-out of the philosophy depart-
ment at the University of Havana and the closure of the left theoretical
journal Pensamiento Crtico.
When it came to questions of culture, however, it was a very dierent
story. Cuban artists and intellectuals were schooled in a highly syn-
cretistic culture that celebrated rumba and surrealism, Yoruba gods and
Catholic transcendentalism, in equal measure. Then, as the Uruguayan
poet Mario Benedetti told Vsquez Montalbn, came the splendor of
those rst seven, eight, nine years that produced the coincidence between
ideological avant-gardism and artistic avant-gardism.5 The Stalinist
concept of socialist realism was widely considered inimical and irrele-
vant, except by a few night-prowling tomcats, as Fornet once put it.
The cineasts paid homage to both Eisenstein and Fellini, as well as the
French New Wave and Brazilian Cinema Novo.
The rst dening moment occurred in 1961, when icaic decided not
to distribute an independent documentary called P.M. The resulting
commotion led to a meeting where Castro, after listening to the argu-
ments, gave the speech known as The Words to the Intellectuals. Here
he encapsulated the cultural position of the Revolution in the phrase
Within the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing, and for the
moment the aesthetic conformists were caught on the hop.6 By 1968,
Cuban cinema was identied not only with anti-imperialism, but with
lms such as Aleas Memorias del subdesarrollo and Luca by Sols, in
which the aesthetic of the European new wave is metamorphosed through
 6 Introduction

a kind of revolutionary transguration; and the documentaries of San-

tiago lvarez (Now, LBJ, Hasta la victoria siempre, and many others),
which seemed to reinvent Soviet agitprop of the 1920s. With lms like
these, the white building at the corner of 23d and 12th in Havanas Vedado
district that once housed dentists consulting rooms, threw down an
exhilarating and infectious experimentalist challenge to the hegemony
of the culture industry headquartered in Hollywood.
If it never reached much of an audience beyond its own shores,
nevertheless, no history of world cinema can aord to ignore the Cuban
transformation of the seventh art. Not just Alea, Sols, and lvarez, but
others, less well known, were infected by the same duende, a Cuban ver-
sion of the impish spirit of creativity described by Lorca, and produced
their best lms under its inuence in these years. They include a trio of
lms devised to celebrate the centenary of the wars of liberation against
Spain, and to retell the history of that struggle from the perspective of a
revolution that drew upon its heritage for its own legitimacy. It is a
mark of the euphoric experimentalism of the 1960s that all these lms
transcend the merely propagandistic. Jorge Fragas intense study of the
guerrilla ghters struggle with nature, La odisea del General Jos (The
odyssey of General Jos, 1967), is based on an incident in 1895. Two years
later, Manuel Octavio Gmez made La primera carga al machete (The
rst machete charge), a highly original documentary drama on a famous
battle against the Spanish a hundred years earlier. In 1971, Jos Massip
came up with a hallucinatory account of the last days of the Cuban na-
tional hero Jos Mart in 1895, in Pginas del diario de Jos Mart (Pages
from the diary of Jos Mart, 1971). Julio Garca Espinosa, the director
of several lms, including a zany comedy called Las aventuras de Juan
Quin Quin (The adventures of Juan Quin Quin, 1967), put forward a
powerful apologia for this experimental eervescence in his manifesto
of 1968, Por un cine imperfecto (For an imperfect cinema), in which he
argued that the imperfections of a low-budget cinema of urgency,
which sought to create a dialogue with its audience, were preferable to
the sheen of high production values that merely reected the audience
back to itself.
Havana would become the second home of radical lmmakers
throughout the continent, just as it became the champion of anti-
imperialism and a leader of third-world nations. Nevertheless, economic
errors were made; critics, nonconformists, and social mists were vic-
 Introduction 7

timized, and the sincere criticism of foreign friends was rejected. What
most shook the cultural world, at home and abroad, were the events of
1971 when the poet Heberto Padilla was castigated for a prize-winning
book of poetry, titled Fuera del juego (Out of the game), which went
against the grain, and was then arrested. A month later, he appeared at a
meeting of the writers and artists union in a public act of self-criticism
seemingly reminiscent of Stalinist show trials, which led to a protest by
former friends of the Revolution like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, the Goytisolo brothers, Jorge Semprn, Carlos
Franqui, and Mario Vargas Llosawho interpreted the incident as a
betrayal of the principles Fidel had so clearly enunciated ten years earlier.
Notwithstanding, Fidel clearly and rmly laid down the line at a na-
tional congress on education and culture. Our evaluation is political.
There can be no aesthetic value without human content. There can be
no aesthetic value against man.7 As a matter of principle, there were
some books that should not be published.
Whether or not because of Alfredo Guevaras close relations with Fidel,
icaic, both before and after the Padilla aair, constituted a space of
relative safety. It had already provided a home for long-haired young
artists like the musicians who were invited to set up the Grupo Sonora
Experimental in 1970, some of whom, such as Pablo Milans, had been
in work camps (the umap camps, or Military Units to Aid Production,
which were quickly closed after protests about their excesses). When
the journal Pensamiento Crtico was shut down, one of its editors, the
writer Jess Daz, was invited to join icaic (where in due course he
would make a number of notable lms, both documentary and ction,
and also become secretary of the party branch). In the party at large,
hard-liners, condent of Moscows backing, held the upper hand, but
their repression fell strongest on broadcasting and the press. Their in-
uence was weaker in cultural areas like cinema, where Alfredo Guevara
and others had defended the relative autonomy of artistic creativity.
Nevertheless, contemporary subjects were dicult to handle in this
atmosphere, and the lmmakers turned to allegories of national iden-
tity. The black director Sergio Giral initiated a cycle of lms, beginning
with El otro Francisco (The other Francisco) in 1974, that asserted Cubas
African heritage by deconstructing and then reassembling the history of
slavery (Solass Cecilia belongs to this trend). Others played safe and re-
counted tales of revolutionary heroes in adaptations of Hollywood genres,
 8 Introduction

like El hombre de Maisinic (The man from Maisinic, Manuel Prez,

1973) and El brigadista (The literacy teacher, Octavio Cortzar, 1977),
both of them powerful lms in themselves but hardly examples of im-
perfect cinema. Meanwhile, the high value placed on documentaries
and newsreels ensured not only that a second generation of lmmakers
were brought into the Institute but that they cut their teeth on direct
encounter with a constantly evolving reality. Occasionally they ran into
trouble. Even Sara Gmez, an outstanding representative of the black
intelligentsia, whose lms deal with the essence of cubana in all its
manifestations, in music, popular religion, and the culture of marginal
communities, was forced to abandon a projected trilogy of documen-
taries that touched on the excesses of machismo and the persistence of
racism, although both these issues are addressed in her last and famously
experimental lm, De cierta manera (One way or another, released in
1977 after her early death). The issue of machismo then burst onto the
screen in the New Wave realism of Pastor Vegas Retrato de Teresa (Por-
trait of Teresa) in 1979, one of the most successful Cuban lms ever,
and the stimulus for wide debate about the double oppression of Cuban
women.
When the end of the 1970s saw Cuba cautiously opening up again,
icaic played a leading role with the creation of the International Festi-
val of New Latin American Cinema in 1979, held ever since in Havana
every December. Since very few lms made in Latin America, and
especially not those that espoused any kind of revolutionary politics,
were seen in any country other than their owna consequence of the
monopoly control of distribution by the Hollywood-based majors
Havana became the continents capital of cinema, practically the only
city where everything made in Latin America worth seeing could be
seen, and a home away from home for many who, like several Chilean
lmmakers after the coup of 1973, were forced into political exile.
The 1980s nonetheless began with an unexpected crisis, when Hum-
berto Sols undertook the most ambitious lm project that icaic had
yet attempted: an epic adaptation of the nineteenth-century Cuban
novel Cecilia Valds. The production tied up so much of the Institutes
production capacity that it caused chagrin among other lmmakers, and
when Sols presented a somewhat discursive and idiosyncratic Freudian
interpretation of the classic novel that, for all its visual splendors, dis-
concerted both traditionalists and the popular audience, disarray among
 Introduction 9

the lmmakers enabled Alfredo Guevaras old adversaries to mount a

rearguard attack and edge him out of power. Despite European copro-
duction funding, Cecilia was an expensive op (and a lm whose reassess-
ment is now overdue). Castro sent Guevara to Paris as Cubas ambassa-
dor to unesco. His successor, Julio Garca Espinosa, who for some
years had been a vice minister of culture with a special interest in music,
quickly brought fresh vision to icaic, pursuing a policy of low-budget
production, democratizing the internal decision-making process, and
giving a new generation of directors a chance to prove themselves. Juan
Carlos Tabo scored an immediate hit with Se permuta (House for swap)
in 1983, a satire on the intractable problem of overcrowding in Havana,
and Cuban cinema now discovered a new genre, the sociocritical comedy.
Espinosa also argued successfully for funds to build up the lm festi-
val, and scored high on the international propaganda stakes by bringing
to Havana sympathetic lm stars and directors from Europe and espe-
cially North America; visitors over the years ranged from directors like
Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, Sidney Pollack, Ermanno Olmi,
and Gillo Pontecorvo to actors like Robert De Niro, Jack Lemmon,
Harry Belafonte, Julie Christie, Gian Maria Volonte, and Maria Paredes.
At the same time, icaic took advantage of the relaxation of relations
with Latin America to extend coproductions with independent lm-
makers throughout the region, which fortied the projection of a Latin
American image on Cuban screens all year round. Meanwhile, the in-
stallation of a new regime in Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev, and its
declaration of communist renewal, with the watchwords perestroika
(restructuring) and glasnost (openness), was welcomed in Havana with
a mixture of relief, curiosity, and suspicionthe Cubans relationship
with the Soviets had never been an easy one. As the Cubans embarked
on their own process of renovation, known as recticacin (rectication),
there was fresh hope that the hard-liners in Havana would also have to
take the lid o. icaic tested the water as early as 1985 by confronting
the fractious issue of the split with the Cuban migr community in the
United States with a thoughtful lm by Jess Daz called Lejana (Dis-
tance). At the end of the decade, another new talent emerged with a
powerful allegory on politics and generational dierence in the shape of
Papeles secundarios (Secondary roles) by Orlando Rojas.
Ironically, as Espinosa was moving from polemicist to the presidency
of icaic, Cuban cinema was shifting its paradigmatic aesthetics. The
 10 Introduction

jagged framing and fragmented montage of the 1960s, the syncopations

of camera and editing, the controlled hysteria of revolutionary agita-
tion, gave way to the composed image, the taming of the violent tropi-
cal light, a more harmonious decoupage. In place of the wild camera of
Jorge Herrera (Luca) and Ramn Surez (Memorias del subdesarrollo),
the new visual paradigms were the chiaroscuro of Livio Delgado (Cecilia)
and the poise of Mario Garca Joya (Mayito) (Lejana). If this shift
seems to suggest a withdrawal from Espinosas ideas about imperfect
cinema, this impression is supercial. For one thing, a similar change is
found in independent cinema throughout Latin America, without nec-
essarily entailing any loss in political acumen. The lms continued to be
shot in real locations, now in color, and increasingly using direct loca-
tion sound, with the result that the sense of penetration of social reality
grew more, not less, intense. Moreover, behind the surface a critical
change was taking place in the script department, and a lm like Tabos
Pla! of 1988 brings back the hilarious illogic of Hollywood comedy
from Hellzapoppin to Blazing Saddles, in a new context, where self-
referentiality crosses with Brechtian defamiliarization to produce a new
brand of self-reexive laughter. Is it merely coincidence, or perhaps
poetic irony, that this stance is so strongly akin to the character of the
carnivalesque described by the highly unconventional Russian thinker
Mikhail Bakhtin, whose works were published in Cuba during the 1980s?
By the time that Daniel Daz Torres completed the most carnivalesque
of this cycle of sociopolitical comedies, Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas
(Alice in Wondertown) at the beginning of 1991, the Cuban Revolution
had been overtaken by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the looming chaos
in the Soviet Union. With the loss of its major trade partners, the Cuban
economy collapsed, and rectication was replaced by the austerity mea-
sures of the Special Period in Times of Peace. Faced with an unusually
scatological satire on bureaucratic mismanagement and cavernicula
(caveman) attitudes, the party faithful reacted with fury. In the middle
of the furor came an announcement about economic rationalizations
designed to cope with the mounting crisis, in which it was decreed that
icaic would merge with the state broadcasting company, icrt (Insti-
tuto Cubano de Radio y Televisin). Ten years after the crisis provoked
by Cecilia, the lmmakers were now faced with an even greater threat
their very disappearance as an autonomous artistic community. This
time they responded with a massive show of unity. With nothing to
 Introduction 11

lose, they formed an emergency committee, which one of them dubbed

the Dead Poets Society, and appealed directly to Fidel. With nely judged
political acumen, they not only kept away from foreign journalists who
tried to besiege them, but made their stand on their own, without call-
ing on the support of fellow artists and intellectuals. Fidel agreed to set
up a commission, and Alfredo Guevara came back from Paris to join it.
icaic won the right to open the lm in Havana, but it ran for only four
days in July before demonstrations by claques of party faithful forced its
withdrawal. A few weeks later, one of the meetings with the commission
had to be suspended because it was interrupted by the news of the coup
dtat in the Soviet Union. The commission never reported formally,
but icaic survived: Garca Espinosa resigned and Guevara took back
the helm.
icaics future was nevertheless extremely bleak. The worsening eco-
nomic crisis cut deep into the Institutes production program as it fol-
lowed other entities into a new regime of self-nancing operations,
where the crucial factor was the need to earn the convertible currency
required for its operations abroad (previously this had been provided
from the states central budgeting), and survival therefore depended on
nding production nance outside the country. Although coproduc-
tions with Latin America during the 1980s, and the reputation for tech-
nical excellence icaic built up in the process, gave many technicians
and actors the chance to earn money abroad individually, the Institute
now found itself in much the same position as other Latin American
lm industries, thrust into a globalized cultural marketplace where they
all competed for the same international coproduction funds (which in
the case of Cuba excluded the United States), and where the interests of
the coproducers did not by any means match the traditional priorities
of Cuban cinema. If a director of the stature of Alea could ride a situa-
tion like this, for others it would become a burden, as the logic of the
market began to enter the equation of a cinema that had never before
regarded the market as the determining factor.
Aleas Spanish-coproduced Fresa y chocolate of 1993 channels a power-
ful plea for tolerance and a cogent defense of the autonomy of critical
thinking into what was in many ways an old-fashioned lm of political
commitment to the socialist ideal. Its immense popularity answered to
a strong collective sentiment, at the very moment that the Cuban Revo-
lution reached its nadir, that the problem lay not in the socialist project
 12 Introduction

but in the dogmatic formulations of actual socialist rule. (As Titn put
it, Socialism is a great script, but with poor directors.)8 Here was a
lm that fullled the role of a public communicative action that voiced
a critical discourse of the left, which, though Cubanologists abroad saw
it as an indication of ideological thaw, was intended as a cultural inter-
vention in a political debate. Aleas death three years later would rob
Cuban cinema of its most complete representative artist, whose example
now became a rallying point for Cuban lmmakers of every tendency.
Signicantly, he was the acknowledged inspiration for two lms by young
lmmakers in the late 1990s: Arturo Sotto, with his second feature,
Amor vertical (Vertical love), produced by icaic in 1997, a surreal soci-
ocritical comedy about frustrated love (which also pays explicit homage
to Buuel and Fellini); and Amanda Chvez, with an independently
shot video, Secuencias inconclusas (Unnished sequences) in the same
year, which examines the options for Cuban cinema in the new dollar-
ized Cuban economy, and is highly critical of icaics recent policies.

The twists and turns of this history, so much of which has been played
out behind closed doors and away from the public eye, have led to widely
divergent interpretations being spread abroad. We need not detain our-
selves with the simplistic views of the Revolutions detractors, for whom
it is merely an accident if any decent lms have been made in Cuba
since 1959; nor with the uncritical commendation of those for whom
anything Cuban is automatically praiseworthy. But if the greatest di-
culty in studying Cuban cinema outside Cuba is the sparse circulation
of the lms, even in these days of videowhich, of course, is a direct
consequence of Cubas isolationthen, at the same time, the greatest
liability is the questionable problem of distinguishing the aesthetic from
the political. Reactions to Cuban lms are bedeviled by the viewers in-
capacity to separate out aesthetic judgments from political ones in the
orthodox manner once assumed by the liberal academy in the West
(though nowadays questioned by critical theory). In fact, the history of
Cuban cinema places in question the assumption that this is either pos-
sible, or even sensible. Politics in Cuban cinema is not a subtext that
either the lmmaker or the critic can include or leave out; it is the
inevitable and ever-present intertext of the aesthetic, and its constant
dialogue with the political. As Armando Hart, who as minister of edu-
cation at the beginning of the Revolution had overseen the literacy
 Introduction 13

campaign, once formulated the problem: To confuse art and politics is

a political mistake. To separate art and politics is another mistake.9
Every Cuban viewer sees every Cuban lm with this knowledge. For the
foreign viewer, however, the character of Cuban cinema as a political
aesthetic presents huge hermeneutic and interpretive diculties, not
least because with limited social referents the subtexts of the lms are
often dicult to decipher.
The result of this situation, pointed out in a recent contribution to
the debate by John Hess, is that two dierent scholars can use the same
theoretical framework to arrive at opposing evaluations.10 The instances
he cites are accounts by Oscar Quiros and Catherine Davies in the British
academic journal Screen in 1996 and 1997, which both use the same
work by the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas (his Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity) to argue virtually opposite positions.11
Davies likes the avant-garde, disjunctive, formally experimental lms
typied by De cierta manera. Quiros favors more conventional lms by
Sols (Amada, 1983), Alea (Cartas del parque [Letters from the park],
1988), and Enrique Pineda Barnet (La bella del Alhambra [The belle of
the Alhambra], 1989). Davies approves of De cierta manera because,
writing from a feminist position, she believes it challenges patriarchal
socialist ideology (jokingly known as machismo-leninismo) by consis-
tently breaking down any attempt to provide a pleasurable resolution
(although other readings, which Hess thinks more accurate, consider the
lm to be both feminist and committed to the Revolution).12 Notwith-
standing, Davies perceptively considers the two main protagonists as
embodying Habermass description of communicative reason, the process
of coming to a mutual understanding on the part of subjects engaged in
the action of speech; in other words, this is not a love story where people
use each other as objects of gratication: Mario and Yolanda are intelli-
gent people who speak to each other and thereby achieve an interper-
sonal relationship that changes both of them. Their story is constantly
interrupted and undercut, however, by documentary sequences explain-
ing the sociohistorical setting, which are themselves then subject to
interruption. If the result is a lm that, in the words of another com-
mentator, oers no single internally consistent discourse, it thereby
fullls the principle of imperfect cinema, which, according to Garca
Espinosa, is above all to show the process which generates the prob-
lems . . . to submit it to judgement without pronouncing the verdict,
 14 Introduction

and thus to stimulate the audience to active involvement in the produc-

tion of meaning on the screen.13 There are critics, it is true, who con-
sider that the commentary (completed by Alea and Garca Espinosa
after Sara Gmezs early death from asthma) has the eect of capturing
the interpretation of these multiple voices in the rigidity of an ocial
line; on the other hand, the mix, and indeed interpenetration, of ction
and documentary (many of the secondary characters are real people
playing themselves) ensures that the commentary too is only one voice
among many. Gmez took the interpenetration of the imaginary and
the documentary from Alea in Memorias del subdesarrollo; Alea, in hom-
age to her, returned to it in Hasta cierto punto (Up to a Point) in 1983, in
which he turns the camera on the distance between a ctional icaic
and the real world of the dockworkers on the other side of the Bay of
Havanaanother unsettling and provocative lm.
Quiros likes Amada precisely because it does not appear to serve any
particular political purpose. This freedom from political dealing is
supposed to demonstrate Habermass arguments about freedom in art,
which has the potential of indicating the existence of a set of logics in-
dependent of those of the Polity.14 However, Sols himself considers
his lm to be a political metaphor, a love story set in the Havana of
1914 through which we tried to take the temperature of a time of frus-
tration, a moment when the popular forces had not recovered . . . after a
War of Independence that had been pacied by North American inter-
vention.15 Quiros has simply failed to see this, just as he misses in La
bella del Alhambra, a story of 1920s Cuban popular theater, the Brecht-
ian quality of the lms allegory, on the impossibility of selling out and,
at the same time, retaining your dignity as an artist or as a nation. Even
in the case of Cartas del parque, which provoked critical attacks on Alea
for indeed not making a political lm, there is a critical subtext, for this
love story, taken from a tale by Gabriel Garca Mrquez, is a meditation
on the uneven social development of early-twentieth-century Cuba,
where heroes y airplanes but resort to a professional scribe to write
their love letters for them. All, in short, are political allegories in the
sense indicated by Fredric Jameson when he speaks of third-world lms
as necessarily allegorical, because even when narrating apparently pri-
vate stories, they turn on metaphors of the inextricable links between
the personal and the political, the individual and the national, the pri-
vate and the historical.16
 Introduction 15

Altogether, Quiross version of Cuban lm history is as topsy-turvy

as Daz Torress Wondertown, a black comedy about the sins of bureau-
cracy where wild animals roam around freely because the cages for the
zoo havent arrived yet. In the 1960s, he says, Cuban cinema labored
under the heavy weight of an ocial Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and
the cultural bureaucracy imposed a narrow aesthetic formula called im-
perfect cinema. As Hess comments, Were he right, this would be the
rst time a Communist Party had imposed avant-garde forms on its
artists.17 Several of icaics early members were Communists, or at
least had participated in the struggle against Batista, yet icaic became
a focus of opposition to any eort to impose aesthetic formulas like so-
cialist realism on Cuban cultural productionbut a left opposition,
which operated on the principle of Fidels famous dictum of 1961, Within
the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing. When Fidel brought the
Communist old guard into power and political struggle was engaged
over the denitions of cultural politics, a number of artists and intellec-
tuals would give up and leave the country, including lmmakers like
the future cinematographer of the French New Wave, Nstor Almendros,
erstwhile youthful collaborator of Alea, and like Alfredo Guevara, a
member of the Communist Youth in the 1950s. Departures like this were
liable to be seen at icaic as betrayals, but the idea of imperfect cinema,
which came later, was not the imposition of some kind of Marxist-
Leninist orthodoxy: it was a position in a war of positions among Com-
munists, Marxists, and fellow travelers over freedom of aesthetic expres-
sion and the rules of aesthetic engagement.
In Quiross through-the-looking-glass history, the opposite of im-
perfect cinema must be perfect cinema, which supposedly arrives in the
1980s. But when he describes this as the freedom to employ all the aes-
thetic possibilities the medium can oer without having to resort to
particular formulae, he is simply paraphrasing Garca Espinosas con-
cept of imperfect cinema.18 On the other hand, he is partly right when
he says that these aesthetic qualities suggest that the sphere of Art is
not aligned with the ocial orthodox ideology of the Cuban Polity.
That is exactly what the crisis moments of 1981, 1992, and 1998 are all
about. However, you cannot understand these crises if you assume, as
Quiros seems to, that Cuban Polity is something xed and given, an
undialectical notion that shows very little understanding of political
reality.
 16 Introduction

Hesss critique of these two commentatorsthat they both misread

the nature of ideological struggle in Cuban cinemais a salient one.
Yet Habermas may still provide a critical key for unlocking the dialectic
of the Cuban imageon condition that what we ask about is the role
of cinema in the structural transformation of the public sphere in Cuba,
the makeover from a small, underdeveloped country to a variant of the
communist state, from the status of economic and cultural neocolony
to that of actually existing socialism, where supposedly the public
sphere in its classic sense no longer exists. The case of Cuban cinema
suggests a dierent interpretation, in which the public sphere does not
simply dissolve, but nds an active and vicarious surrogate on the lm
screen.
It is Habermass thesis that the public sphere as a formal concept is the
product of the rise of bourgeois society, the creation of a (theoretically)
universal and democratic space of debate about politics and culture,
which must be won from the absolutist state and the rule of the aristoc-
racy, and then defended against encroachment by alien or illiberal forces.
Initially the assertion of the rights of the propertied men of education
and culture who made up the bourgeois public, encroachments come
from several directions. From the left comes the need to cede democratic
rights to subaltern classes, lacking in property, education, and culture,
and eventually, to women. The public sphere thus becomes, in theory,
all-inclusive, but in fact develops mechanisms and institutions designed
to maintain a sense of social hierarchy and thus defend the body politic.
Meanwhile, capitalist development produces the growth of advertising
and the commercial press, which impinge on the public sphere from the
right. The mass media and new communications technologies produce
new forms of addressing the public, in the form of a vertical ow,
wherein social dialogue is embodied in reductive genres and stereotypes
(and open to manipulation by political forces who have learned how to
play the game). Fascism, capitalism, and communism inherit this situa-
tion and deal with it dierently. Capitalism develops practices such as
public relations and news management intended to mold and bend
public opinion by less than honest means, while, as Walter Benjamin
put it in the closing words of his best-known essay, fascism renders pol-
itics aesthetic, and communism responds by politicizing art.19
The Cuban public sphere in the late nineteenth century, in spite of its
colonial status under Spanish rule, was relatively well developed; indeed,
 Introduction 17

thirty years of liberation wars had strengthened its instincts. North Amer-
ican intervention propelled the new republic into the twentieth century
with a vengeance. The island became an oshore testing laboratory for
U.S. penetration of Latin American media markets from the end of
World War I, a bridgehead for companies like itt and rcathe latter
took to promoting Cuban music and radio productions throughout Cen-
tral America, supported by advertising agencies that trained up Cuban
artists and copywriters. In one of the rst Latin American countries
equipped with television, the Cuban revolutionaries of the 1950s were
intensely aware of the power of the media. Fernando Prez portrays the
eects in his rst feature, Clandestinos (Clandestine, 1986), based on real
incidents in which the urban underground that supported the rebels in
the mountains mounted demonstrations in front of television cameras
at baseball matches and audience TV shows, and even invented an ad-
vertising campaign for the Revolution under the guise of launching a new
product. Meanwhile, the guerrillas in the mountains ran a free radio
station that impugned the ocial media, and also proved highly adept
at using U.S. media opportunities to their advantage. When the Revolu-
tion took power, the Rebel Army set up a lm unit even before icaic
was created, to make documentaries for the cinema explaining policies
in key areas like agrarian reform (Alea and Garca Espinosa were among
the directors). icaic was set up as a nonmilitarist alternative with the
same political commitment, but took the form of a novel kind of public
entity: an autonomous institute, not unlike what in Britain is called a
quango (quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organization), but em-
powered to take over any part of the countrys lm industry that might
be nationalized. While the press and broadcasting became a site of ide-
ological confrontation where the state would soon take direct control,
cinema in Cuba came to occupy a unique cultural space as a major site
of public discourse that at the same time enjoyed a de facto autonomy
because of a privileged relation to the source of power and authority. The
result was much the same relationship to the state as the bbc in Britain,
which operates according to what the British call the arms-length prin-
ciple: a major part of the cultural apparatus of the state that is nonethe-
less trusted to run itself, and as a result is free to experiment in the full
glare of its public (which the bbc also once used to do). The conven-
tional view is that in the communist state the political public sphere
ceases to exist, and the cultural public sphere is reduced and denuded
 18 Introduction

by direct censorship, the direct arm of state patronage, and sanction. In

Cuba, this happened to radio, television, and the press, but not to cinema.
icaics rst eorts (including the Rebel Army documentaries whose
production was taken over by the new institute) owed much in terms of
style to the social documentary la John Grierson, just as the rst fea-
tures followed the model of Italian neorealism. But these paradigms
were soon surpassed by the very speed of revolutionary change, which
threatened to leave the lmmakers standing on the very terrain where
lm and reality meet, the spatial environment. Alea was struck by the
speed of change when he shot his comedy Las doce sillas (The Twelve
Chairs) in 1962. Between going out to reconnoiter a location and com-
ing back to lm there, it would be transformed: a rich familys mansion
turned into an art school, a billboard advertising a luxury hotel in
Miami now declared Cuba a territory free of illiteracy. It was the volatil-
ity of spatial appearance itself that pushed the lmmakers into the ex-
ploration of new aesthetic means of capturing and expressing it, or else
failing to register political reality. The problem was therefore at once
aesthetic and political, and it consequently becomes impossible to under-
stand Cuban cinema on a theoretical basis that separates politics and
art, as if the artist has any choice in the matter, as if the Cuban lmmaker
could choose to be political or not. But when Walter Benjamin says that
communism politicizes art, in Cuban cinema there is a rider: not by
diktat, but because politics and art engage in dialogue. This dialogue
allows the cinema screen to become more than either propaganda or a
diversionary space, but a crucial preserve of public speech, a space that
engages large sectors of the population in debate about the meaning
and quality of their lives; a vicarious role that is negatively reinforced by
the much tighter control exercised by the party over broadcasting and
the press. But as a neighbor says to me on a visit to Havana in 1998 (I am
living in an apartment in Vedado), Here people go the cinema in order
to enjoy nding out what the lm has to say about something relevant.
When the revolutionaries took power in 1959, cinema was at a peak
of popularity. Box-oce earnings in 1960 reached 22,800,000 pesos,
roughly 120 million admissions; for a population of around seven mil-
lion, this gives a national cinema-going average of seventeen visits an-
nuallyand this is why it mattered. icaic took over the production
and distribution of lms in Cuba in a series of steps that turned Cuban
cinema into a state monopoly, but in the process opened this space up
 Introduction 19

to critical expression, albeit within certain limits. Alfredo Guevaras po-

litical genius lay in persuading his personal friend and political chief to
let him place art rather than propaganda at the center of the Institutes
visionin other words, to allow him the rule of artistic freedom. The
results so intrigued the audience that they began to change their view-
ing habits. They started, for example, taking documentaries seriously,
especially the lms of Santiago lvarez. In the 1970s, icaic researchers
found that people sometimes went to the movies because they wanted
to see the new lvarez, and would then stay and watch whatever feature
was put on after ita complete inversion of normal cinema-going be-
havior. icaic responded by producing a whole series of feature docu-
mentaries for cinema distribution by lvarez and others, a policy that
arms the screen as a site of encounter with social reality.
lvarez himself made a cycle of lms following Fidel around the world:
to Chile in 1972 for De Amrica soy hijo . . . y a ella me debothe title is a
quotation from the great Cuban patriot Jos Mart (I am a son of Amer-
ica . . . and I owe myself to it); the Soviet Union in 1973 for Y el cielo fue
tomado por asalto (And the heavens were taken by assault, a quotation
from the Communist Manifesto); Vietnam in 1974 for Abril de Vietnam
en el ao del Gato (April in Vietnam in the Year of the Cat). If these
titles earned lvarez the status of Fidels poet laureate, the encomium
can be misleading: to be sure, these lms are full of Fidels brand of po-
litical rhetoric, but they are also masterpieces of extended observational
reportage of the Comandante in action, and sometimes relaxing, which
thoroughly humanize the conventional image of the gure of the Latin
American caudillo. Meanwhile, Manuel Herreras Girn (Bay of Pigs,
1972) is a highly original drama-documentary of the thwarted 1961 inva-
sion; Jorge Fraga followed a year later with an extended reportage titled
La nueva escuela (The new school). At the end of the decade, Jess Daz
made two lms that represent the acme of the genre. The rst of these,
55 Hermanos (55 brothers and sisters), follows a group of young Cuban-
Americans on a rst-ever visit to the island in 1978, culminating in
meeting with Fidel at his most persuasive: they should not ask to come to
Cuba but remain in their new country and work on Cubas behalf. Two
years later, En tierra de Sandino (In Sandinos land) is a three-part por-
trait of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, probably the most pene-
trating of the many lms on Nicaragua at this time by lmmakers of many
dierent countries.20 Both are paradigms of the authored observational
 20 Introduction

documentary in Latin America (not to speak of documentary art else-

where) to put beside the work of Paul Leduc in Mexico (Mesquital, 1976),
or the Colombian documentarist Ciro Durn (Gamin, 1978).
It was the greatest loss of Cuban cinema in the 1990s that the produc-
tion of documentaries was largely curtailed. Films like these, together
with the forty or more shorter documentaries that icaic used to pro-
duce every year, fullled one of the prime functions that in liberal
democracies is ascribed to the public-service responsibilities of the broad-
casting companies, that of keeping the public informed in a manner
that also educates them in the issues of the day. That icaic evidently
did this in a manner that audiences found both more entertaining and
more eective than broadcasting and the press ensured that the Insti-
tute enjoyed a high reputation, which lent its lmmakers a capacity to
connect with dierent social sectorsintellectuals and campesinos, artists
and sugar-cane workers, even party bureaucrats and marginal youth
through the same lms. Alea once told me that any doubts he might
have had that the complex and sophisticated lm language of Memorias
del subdesarrollo was inimical to a popular audience were dispelled when
he learned that a large number of people were so intrigued by the lm
that they would go to see it two or three times. In the early years of the
Revolution, the broad acceptance of such an adventurous cinema was
the result of the social cohesion generated by the revolutionary process
itself, which was both symbolized and enacted in the literacy campaign
of 1961, depicted by Octavio Cortzars El brigadista of 1977. Teenagers
from the cities taught peasants in the countryside to read and write using
texts and ideas that were new to both, so that the words that expressed a
new political discourse created a new set of shared values. With this
extraordinary piece of social and political engineering, written language
and everything that comes with it translated into access to a new sense
of national culture on a mass scale from which the lmmakers were
able to benet. Aesthetically, for example, the literacy campaign is at
the root of the playful way in which Santiago lvarez replaced the con-
ventional spoken commentary of the newsreel and documentary with
animated words moving backwards and forwards across the screen. But
the process went much further. According to the political scientist Rafael
Hernndez, it was as if language itself was liberated from the structures
of control that previously divided the social classes into dierent lin-
guistic communities; the traditional sociolinguistic stratication was
 Introduction 21

ruptured; the most humble people took possession of linguistic territo-

ries previously veiled from them; knowledge and culture became cen-
tral elements of prestige in the new social order.21 Cuban cinema was
also a celebration of this expansive popular culture, and it was in order
to keep up with it, when political life gradually slid into ideological con-
formity, that it turned to social comedy, a genre in which it proves pos-
sible to sustain a dialogue with the audience on the basis of allusion and
intimation.
The public character of the consumption of cinema, in contrast to
the domestic privacy of television reception, means that even when lm
audiences began to decline with the spread of television (as well as com-
petition from other forms of diversion), Cuban cinema retained its pres-
tige. In 1984, a rst feature by Rolando Daz, the sociocritical comedy
Los pjaros tirndole a la escopeta (Tables turned), drew an audience of
two million in the rst two monthsnearly one-fth of the entire pop-
ulation. To go to the cinema in Cuba, I am told in 1998 by the scriptwriter
of Alicia . . . , Eduardo del Llano, who at thirty-six years of age represents
the third generation of Cuban lmmakers, the generation that emerged
in the 1980s, is like what you call entering the public sphere, it depends
on the public side of the thing, because going to the cinema is like an
act of complicity with the public world.22 Even today, Cuban cinema
audiences not only comprise a broad mixture of every social group and
age, but the darkness of the cinema is not that of silent fantasy but a
constant murmur of voices, which periodically break into calls and
comments on the events depicted. Cuban lmmakers strongly feel the
weight of responsibility that comes with this power to address the large
public, a power in many ways second only to that of the lder mximo
(maximum leader), and naturally, as del Llano puts it, El icaic por su
propio autonoma tiene ms ojos por encima (icaic, by dint of its
very autonomy, is always under scrutiny). If the lmmakers are thus
engaged in a balancing act that occasionally leads them to stumble, it is
not a question of simply bowing to the dictates of authority, because
they sense that their privilege as lmmakers is not so much granted
from above as loaned to them by the public that crowds the cinemas.
In short, if Cuban cinema constitutes an aesthetic imbricated with a
political spirit it is because it answers to a vicarious role in the public
sphere, a calling to speak not at people, but with them, and often in
their own voices.
 22 Introduction

In the crisis years of the 1990s, however, these equations started to

break down and the coherence of the cultural project represented by
icaic began to fragment. The countrys economic collapse seriously cur-
tailed icaics production capacity; lmmakers and actors began to
emigrate or seek short-term jobs abroad; as the institute turned its
eorts to coproductions with commercial, mainly European, partners,
disaection would grow among lmmakers disoriented by the shifting
ground rules. Some even wondered if the return of Alfredo Guevara
represented a step forwards or backwards. Since 1993, no lm has been
able to achieve the same impact as Fresa y chocolate, but several are
authentic attempts to trace a tortuous process of recovery. From 1994,
Madagascar by Fernando Prez is a sombre depiction of the inward
journey of three generations of women; four years later in La vida es sil-
bar, he turns out a surrealist comedy on three contemporary characters
and their unfullled dreams. At the end of the decade, Juan Carlos Tabo
returned to form with Lista de espera, a comedy in homage to Alea that
allegorizes Cuba as a bus station from which no one can leave because
the buses have stopped running. These and a number of other lms
the portmanteau Mujer transparente of 1990, Julio Garca Espinosas Reina
y Rey of 1995share a common theme identied by a recent Cuban
writer, Dsire Daz, as The Ulysses Syndrome: the trope of the jour-
ney, found in these lms in a myriad of forms, real, metaphorical, and
imaginedmigration, departure, return, internal exile, the impossible
promise. This imagery can hardly be accidental for an island nation
where successive waves of emigration over the last four decades have
created the trauma of a divided community, and leaving the country
becomes a dramatic act associated with feelings of rupture, repudia-
tion, and loss. But perhaps it might be considered poetic justice that
just as the coherence of icaics cultural politics has been called into
question, the lmmakers have responded to the crisis of Cubas and their
own isolation with an apparently shared existential tendency to allego-
rize the image of the nation as an imagined community.
 PA RT I
Before the Revolution:
Cinema at the Margins
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER ONE
For the First Time

The screen comes to life. Three men wearing the working clothes of a
tropical country are grouped around the front of a truck with its hood
open. One of them stands more or less facing the camera, another is sit-
ting on the fender, and the third is working on the engine. An unseen
questioner is asking them about their job, and, as they speak, the picture
cuts to the interior of the truck, to show us the ttings they describe,
including projection gear and stowaway beds. For this is a cine mvil, a
mobile cinema unit, and the job consists in showing lms in small and
isolated communities, in the schools during the day and for everyone in
the evenings. Do they know of any place where movies have not yet been
shown? Yes, says one, I know of a place that is so entangled and the
road is so bad that its almost completely cut o. Its called Los Mulos,
in the Guantnamo-Baracoa mountain region.1
Then comes music and the title sequence, incorporating traveling
shots taken from the cabin of the truck as it drives to Los Mulos, which
is discovered lying in a valley. We are watching Por primera vez (For the
rst time), a prize-winning ten-minute black-and-white documentary
made in 1967 and directed by Octavio Cortzar, a young Cuban director
whountypicallytrained at the Prague lm school.
We meet the people in the village, beginning with the children. In the
schoolroom, the teacher explains about the arrival of the mobile cinema.
Then a woman explains that she has lived in the village for seventeen
years and they have no entertainment there. Another woman tells us,
No, I never saw lms during the time of the other government, because

25
 26 For the First Time

we couldnt go to see them and neither did they come here to the coun-
try. The oscreen voice asks her, What do you think lms are? and
she replies, They must be something very important, since youre so
interested in them; they must be something very beautiful. Another
woman muses, Film is . . . well, lots of things happen in the cinema.
You see snakes and you see beautiful girls and you see weddings, horses,
war, and all that. Well, says one of the others, Ive never seen a lm,
you know, but I think maybe you get a esta or a dance or something
like that, but I want to see one so nobody has to describe it to me.
And then we see them watching a lmChaplins Modern Times.
The sequence with the automatic lunch machine has them in tears of
laughter. We see faces gazing in wide-eyed amazement and delightthe
camera lming is positioned in front of them just under the screen so
we see them full face. Old men and women look as if they cannot be-
lieve the cinema has really come to them, and a little girl bites her nger
in excitement.
What we seem to see and hear in their conversation with the screen is
what anyone must have been able to see and hear anywhere at the turn
of the century, when the rst teasing reports circulated about the won-
ders of the cinematograph machine, until nally some itinerant enter-
tainer or adventurous small entrepreneur arrived and announced a lm
show. Or is it? It is said that early lm viewers sometimes reacted as if
the projected scene were physically before them. Maxim Gorki wrote of
the Lumire lm Teasing the Gardener that the image carried such a
shock of veracity that you think the spray is going to hit you too, and
instinctively shrink back.2 The earliest audiences, in other words, did
not always see the screen as a screen, a barrier, as it were, between them
and the pictured world. But they soon learned eagerly to accept the
screens power of illusion. This illusion hangs on the peculiar relation-
ship that arose between the camera and the audience, which the devel-
opment of narrative cinema came almost entirely to depend on: the cam-
era as an invisible surrogate for the human observer that enables the
audience to see without being seen, to feel that it is present but disem-
bodied within the projected viewa condition that nowadays is largely
taken for granted.
The viewers naive identication with the camera becomes possible
because paradoxically there is a sense in which the camera is outside the
scene that is being lmedin the same way that the eye, as Wittgenstein
 For the First Time 27

Por primera vez (Octavio Cortzar, 1967)

mentioned, is outside the view that it sees, on the edge of it, and can
never see itself except in reection. But in another sense the camera is
part of, inside the scene, occupying the same area, the same space, in
which it moves around, taking up rst one position and then another.
The eect of lm depends largely on the interaction between these two
viewing conditions, for it is their fusion that gives the viewer the im-
pression of disembodiment, being present but unseen. But this state of
aairs hardly impinged on the early lmmakers, for whom the prolmic
eventthe scene they were lmingwas still set apart like the scene
within a theatrical set. The image reproduced on the screen was conse-
quently also set apart; it was a world that at one and the same time re-
produced reality and also swallowed it up and regurgitated it magically.
This screen world looks the same as the one we live in, but turns out to
behave according to its own logic, its own laws, which have their own
form of rationality. Whether or not, however, an audience is disposed to
see the screen world as a magical one or as an authentic representation of
the real world is another matter, not logical but ideological and political.
To approach the question another way: just as the classical econo-
mists regarded the act of consumption of commodities as something
that occurred after all the economic transactions involved were duly
completed and therefore of no technical interest to them, so too the act
of watching a lm. The lm industry regards the way in which the lm
 28 For the First Time

makes contact with the audience exclusively under the rubric of market-
ing. Reaching an audience is only a question of marketing it eectively;
this is what brings the audience in. But theres entirely another way of
seeing this relationship: as the reception by an audience of an aesthetic
object. The lm lives not through people paying money to see it, but
through the sensual, sentimental, psychological, and intellectual grati-
cation they are able to draw from it and the signicance they are able to
grant it.
This aesthetic relationship is supposedly the sphere of criticism, but
the marketing business is so all-embracing that too often the critic be-
comes merely its adjunct, a kind of gloried advertising copywriter to
be quoted on the billboards (or else an oppositional and marginalized
gure, whom the billboards systematically exclude). No matter that at
the beginning lm wasnt considered an art form. About a decade after
its birth in 1895, it started to acquire the characteristics and capacities of
narrative and visual expression and began to claim critical attention.
But then came the big production companies that emerged after about
another decade of growth, and they rapidly learned the publicity value
of claiming for their product the status of art, if only to draw in past the
ticket window the more respectable classes of society who were not
among the early enthusiasts for the medium. In this way, old assump-
tions about aesthetic consumption passed to cinema, and one of the
big studios even emblazoned the formula around the head of its roaring
lion: Ars gratia artis, art for arts sake. But it was blu.
An Italian theorist, Antonio Ban, has described the atomized condi-
tion which the lm industry imposed on its audiences, and which, in an
industry that suered substantial risks of nancial loss, it reinforced
above all other possible relationships with the screen, as an insurance
policy against the unpredictability that, in spite of everything, audi-
ences continued to manifest. The book of his from which the following
passage is taken was published by the Cuban Film Institute, icaic, dur-
ing the 1960s, as one of a series of texts on cinema and aesthetics that
established the terms of reference for critical and theoretical discussion
of these issues in revolutionary Cuba. Ban describes the situation in
the countries of the metropolis, and what he says is often much less
true of the attitudes of audiences in underdeveloped countries where
traditional popular cultures still have force and a more collective rela-
tionship obtains. But then his account serves as a warning:
 For the First Time 29

The cinema public is the anonymous everyday crowd of every extraction

that enters with no particular social disposition or commitment, at an
hour neither xed nor anticipated, and leaves to plunge back again into
the course of everyday life. As a spectator, seated among the rows, each
person in the audience is enveloped in darkness, alone; there is no
communication, nor reciprocal reection. The spectator absorbs the
spectacle that much more eectively and avidly as an individual.
Withdrawn from intersubjective relations, the spectator does not nd
the representation cathartic. Nor is there a feeling of being dominated;
not only because of the impressionist and suggestive character of the
representation itself and the technical artice of which cinema avails
itself with the aim of simplifying and stereotyping the action and deter-
mining the meaning, but also because of the isolation and passivity that
envelop the spectator in the absence of collective participation in the
spectacle. First and foremost, the spectator, more in a state of fragmenta-
tion than organic wholeness, accepts the elements of the spectacle just as
they are served up. Rather than an integrated personality, the spectator is
more often a bundle of instincts with silent, unconfessed demands,
nding satisfaction in the commonplaces of rhetorical positions and
solutions, the vulgar attitudes, rowdy incidents, cheap humor, and
banalities that make up the pastiche of cinema . . . At the center is the
xationsometimes obsessiveof types, gestures, tones, and values
that the spectator absorbs and unconsciously imitates, seeing, or wishing
to see, life refracted in them.3
Por primera vez marks a change in all that. Cuban cinema has done more
in this lm than simply capture something that evaded the rst lm-
makers. It has produced for its audience a vision of its own self-discovery
as an audience. These simple and least portentous of images, presented
without any special tricks or cleverness, communicate to a Cuban audi-
ence the most concrete possible signs of their own activity. For a non-
Cuban audience too they may carry the indication of profound changes
in the conditions of consumption. We see, rst, that the moment of con-
sumption is also a moment of productionnot only the production of
wonder, laughter, and all those other reactions, but the production of,
precisely, an audience, subjects for the lm that is the object of their at-
tention. Second, we see that there is nothing private about this. The expe-
rience of the audience, the excitement that enthuses them, is contagious.
At the same time, Por primera vez embodies a process that is hardly
present in capitalist society, a circuit from consumption to production
and back again to consumption such that it raises the act of consumption
onto a new level. An audience consumes a lm, a camera lms them,
 30 For the First Time

and a lm is produced; the lm is then consumed by a new audience in

circumstances that give them a new awareness of their own status. The
circumstances in capitalist cinema generally always leave the audience
in the same condition of naive consumption they began in. This is a
lm that may give an audience anywhere a rare experience of vicarious
delight tinged with a kind of nostalgia. For the Cuban audience, it be-
came a living analogue of the development of cinema within the Revo-
lution, because here the audience has become, together with the lm-
makers, participant observers and observant participators in the same
process. It was the naive enthusiasm that people brought to the moving
pictures at the rst encounter that led Lenin to sign the decree of August
27, 1919, which nationalized the businesses that made up the czarist lm
industry. The revolutionaries recognized this naive enthusiasm as a force
to be mobilized. In conversation with Commissar of Education Anatoly
Lunacharsky a couple of years after the nationalization, Lenin expressed
the belief that for us, lm is the most important of all the arts. The re-
mark is often quoted in works on the history of cinema by people who
have no real notion of what he meant and why he meant it. They think
that Lenin, who once revealed that he was suspicious of the beauty of
the music of Beethoven, was nothing but a cold propagandist. What
Lenin was talking about, however, can be seen in the way early Soviet
cinema responded to its mission with fantastic creative energy, bringing
forward in the process the rst serious theoretical considerations on
the medium. Something close to this has also happened in Cuba. Cubas
leading documentarist, Santiago lvarez, considers the parallel extremely
apt. Commenting on the comparison that has been made more than once
between his own work and that of Dziga Vertov, he explained in a con-
versation with the present author that since the comparison is obviously
correct but that he didnt know Vertovs work until the early 1970s, the
explanation must lie in the similarity of the situations. In other words,
the discovery of cinema in both countries in and through the revolu-
tionary process.
With the Revolution, cinema in Cuba became, in a word, highly ani-
mated. The mobilization of the audiences enthusiasm in turn enthused
the lmmakers. In complete contrast, in the developed countries during
the same period, the magic of cinema was wearing o. Television had
invaded the home and the thrill of the discovery of the moving image
that was so strong in the early years of cinema now lay as if buried in
 For the First Time 31

some unconscious memory. Nowadays, the child becomes accustomed

to the constant presence of a miniaturized world of images constantly
in motiona very dierent experience from rst beholding the enor-
mous image of the cinema screeneven before it has learned to talk. It
is a world it learns to recognize perhaps no later than it learns to recog-
nize its own reection in a mirror.
In Britain, the loss of the cinema audience was particularly steep. In
1945, thirty-ve million attendances were recorded by the countrys cin-
emas each weekin a country with a population of roughly forty-ve
million. By 1980, attendance had fallen to a mere 101 million for the
whole year (with a further reduction of ten million over the next ten
years), while the countrys population had meanwhile grown by about
ten million, or roughly the same as the population of Cuba.
Until the start of the 1980s, annual admission gures for Cuban cin-
ema tell a very dierent story. By the late 1940s, the gure had reached
about fty-seven million; box-oce earnings in 1949 were 16.69 million
pesos (the Cuban peso was valued at one U.S. dollar at the time of the
Revolution). It was in the late 1940s that cinema audiences in the United
States began to fall, a little later in Britain. A principal cause of this fall,
television, was introduced into Cuba in the early 1950s, earlier than most
Latin American countries, but it made no incursion on cinema audi-
ences because it was hardly accessible to any but the better-o classes.
And indeed, cinema attendance in Cuba continued to grow until 1956,
when box-oce earnings reached 20.99 million pesos. A small fall in
attendance in 1957 and 1958 was due to political conditions and the eects
of the guerrilla war (cinemas were a target of bomb attacks). Then, the
moment the Revolution took power, and its economic policies in-
creased peoples purchasing power, box-oce earnings shot up again
and reached 22.8 million pesos in 1960. This very high levelroughly
120 million admissions a yearrepresented a national average of about
seventeen cinema visits per person in a year; but since a fair proportion
of the population had no access to cinema, the actual attendance for
those who did works out even higher. Attendance was sustained during
the 1960s but fell during the 1970s to around 86.5 million, or an average
of twelve annual cinema visits per person. One reason for this reduc-
tion, however, is an increase in alternative opportunities for entertain-
ment and cultural participation. During 1977, for example, there were
46,704 professional performances in the dierent arts, which recorded
 32 For the First Time

an attendance of 11,837,300; there were also 269,931 acionado perfor-

mances with an attendance of 47,874,800.4 Taken together, these are al-
most three-quarters the number of paying cinema attendances. icaic
was not therefore too worried by the loss in the audience. But the early
1980s saw a sudden huge fall in admissions to less than half its previous
level. In fact, the cinema audience fell not only in Cuba but in a number
of other Latin American countries too, like Chile and Brazil, where
color television had now reached the mass of the audience. In Cuba, the
spread of television has been slower, but it seems to be nally catching
up on cinema there too. The reason appears to be not an improvement
in the quality of television, which is poor, so much as an increase in the
number of new lms shown on television, which developments in video
have made more easily available. Yet in the cinemas, Cuban lms them-
selves have retained their popularity. A successful Cuban lm may nowa-
days be seen by a million people or more in the space of its rst two
months. In 1984, a rst feature by Rolando Daz, the socially critical
comedy Los pjaros tirndole a la escopeta (Tables turned) drew an audi-
ence of two million in its rst two months. It is clear that cinema in
Cuba has remained one of the most powerful instruments of both so-
cial cohesion and social debate.
In many ways, the problem for cinema is primarily economic. Cuba
entered the 1980s with approximately ve hundred 35 mm cinemas on
the island, with extremely low admission prices, which remained roughly
the same as twenty-ve years earlier. A good number of these cinemas
were new, either replacing older structures or situated in new locations,
though the total number had remained more or less constant. At the
same time, the population of Cuba had grown by about three million
since the Revolution, which helped to keep the cinemas full. Addition-
ally, a part of the increased cinema audience in the early 1960s was
made up of those sections of the rural population who before 1959 had
virtually no access to cinema at all. The new regime decided to take cin-
ema to them and the mobile cinemas were set up; their showings were
free. Nor was this a stopgap policy. They continued to operate until re-
placed by video salons in the 1980s. There were also a growing number
of noncommercial xed-location 16 mm exhibition outlets, located in
cultural centers, lm clubs, schools, colleges, and so forth; these too col-
lect no box oce. By the start of the 1980s, there were a total of 741 16 mm
outlets, including mobile cinemas, which held 332,700 showings between
 For the First Time 33

them to an audience of 33 million. In sum, as one Latin American com-

mentator put it, By enormously expanding the cinema public and
multiplying the opportunities of access to a variety of presentations,
conditions for the diversication and enrichment of taste have been set
in motion, also leading to intercommunication between regions of the
country that used not to know each other, and the construction of an
organic national culture.5 If cinema is not the only medium involved
in this process, it is certainly one of the main ones.
There is a related set of gures whose careful interpretation is also re-
vealing. The number of features released annually in the 1970s was about
130. This was just over a quarter of the annual release gure at its height
before the Revolution. Unsympathetic commentators would hold this
reduction as evidence of the autocratic designs of the communist gov-
ernment. The truth is rather dierent. In the rst place, the previous
gure was primarily the result of one of the standard methods by which
Hollywood ensured its control over foreign screens: by oversupplying
them (the mechanisms they used are analyzed in a later chapter). Sec-
ond, the lower gure of the years following the Revolution was partly a
result of the nefarious designs of successive U.S. administrations in main-
taining an economic blockade against Cuba, which, among other things,
has made it almost impossible for the Cubans to obtain those North
American movies they might want to show, and which, because of the
economic constraints the country suered as a consequence of the block-
ade, also required them to economize on the purchase of lms from
other capitalist countries. Yet these diculties also had a positive eect:
fewer lms means that each lm had a potentially larger share of the
audience than was previously true for all but the most successful pictures.
And this contributed to the role that cinema had in Cuba in nourishing
social cohesion.
Indeed, there was a remarkable growth in Cuba of national conscious-
ness of and through cinema. Another lm by the same director as Por
primera vez gives a clue as to why: El brigadista (The teacher, 1977), a
feature movie, portrays Mario, a fteen-year-old member of one of the
1961 literacy brigades (brigadista literally means brigade member) who
goes to teach in a small village in a remote part of the Zapata swamp to
the south of Havana. The boys arrival is greeted with suspicion on the
part of many in the village who do not believe that a kid of his age
could be a teacherincluding Gonzalo, the village leader, in whose
 34 For the First Time

house the boy is billeted. Little by little, however, Marios tenacity and
the events of the struggle against the counterrevolutionary bandits, the
gusanoswormshidden in the swamps, bring the boy and Gonzalo
closer together. A profound friendship develops between them, as Mario
teaches Gonzalo to read and write and Gonzalo teaches Mario to over-
come his adolescent fears. The lm is not without its problems. It rep-
resents Cuban cinema at its stylistically most traditional, with an orthodox
narrative form that inevitably emphasizes a certain naive machismo in
its young hero, which is already strong enough in the story as it is. This
may even have been one of the reasons why the lm was so popular,
with a strong appeal across the dierent generations. (On the other
hand, the even more popular Retrato de Teresa is highly critical of
machismo.) However, and just as important, it was a lm that had an
equally strong appeal across the dierent generations. It stimulated the
memories of both teachers and taught, bringing back to them the pro-
found changes in their lives that the 1961 campaign had rendered, while
it explained to those too young or not yet born why the literacy cam-
paign occupied such an important position in revolutionary history. It
also dealt with practically the same cultural operation, says its director,
as his earlier lm Por primera vez: the brigadistas brought literacy where
the mobile cinemas brought the movies.6 Both are means whereby the
popular classes in Cuba have been able to discover their own reality and
their own history. El brigadista shows a process of cultural exchange be-
tween a peasant and a boy from an urban middle-class background.
The portrayal is idealized, but the lm could not have been made with-
out the very same process having taken place within the development of
Cuban cinema itself. The experience of taking lms to new audiences
was instrumental in making Cuban cineasts responsive to the cultural
needs of the popular classes. While they thrilled at their own good for-
tune in being able to make lms for the rst time, they were also en-
thused by the parallel thrill of an audience seeing lms for the rst time,
and seeing things in them that had never previously been shown on
Cuban cinema screens. One of the themes of the present study is the
exploration of this process and its implications.
The birth of a new cinema with the Revolution in Cuba in 1959 was
sponsored by the force that overthrew the dictatorship of Batistathe
Rebel Army that grew out of the July 26th Movement. With the victory
of the Revolution, the Cubans set about the construction of a new lm
 For the First Time 35

industry even more rapidly than did the October Revolution. The Cuban
Film Institute (icaic) was created less than three months after the Rebel
Army, led by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, entered Havana on
January 1, 1959, while Fidel Castro, at the other end of the island, led the
rebels entry into Santiago de Cuba. icaic was set up under the rst de-
cree concerning cultural aairs passed by the Revolutionary Government,
signed by Castro as prime minister and Armando Hart as minister of
education (later minister of culture). Alfredo Guevara (no relation), a
young activist in the urban underground that had supported the guer-
rillas and a compaero of Fidels since student days, was appointed to
head the new organization.
The new cinema that the Revolution promoted was not entirely
without antecedents, either in Cuba, where the rst political lm dates
back to the production of a newsreel by the Communist Party news-
paper in 1939, or elsewhere in Latin America. The founder, in Argentina
in 1956, of the Documentary Film School of Santa Fe, Fernando Birri,
was one of a number of Latin Americansothers included the Cubans
Toms Gutirrez Alea and Julio Garca Espinosawho had studied lm
in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale in the early 1950s, and who brought
back with them to Latin America the ideals and inspiration of Italian
neorealism; because, as Birri has explained, neorealism was the cinema
that discovered amid the clothing and rhetoric of development another
Italy, the Italy of underdevelopment. It was a cinema of the humble and
the oended that could be readily taken up by lmmakers in the under-
developed countries.7
At the same time, especially given the limited resources available to
them and the diculty of entering the industry in those countries where
a lm industry existed, other inuences manifested themselves as well.
Birri also speaks of John Grierson, who visited the documentary and
experimental lm festival of the sodre in Montevideo in 1961, of his
idea of the social documentary, and of documentary as a hammer with
which to mold realityideas that were also taught in Rome. The rst
lm to emerge from Santa Fe, Birris Tire die (Throw Us a Dime), com-
pleted in 1958, represents a new documentary paradigm along these
lines for Latin America, a lm based on a lengthy investigation (which
Birri called the process of successive approximations to reality) among
the shantytown dwellers with whom it deals and who were closely in-
volved in its completion.
 36 For the First Time

Cinema Novo in Brazil established a new paradigm for the feature

lm in Latin America, with examples such as Rio, quarenta graus (Rio,
forty degrees) and Rio, zona norte (Rio, north zone), which appeared in
1955 and 1957, respectively, directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. While
the Documentary School of Santa Fe was born, according to Birri, out
of the cultural and industrial disintegration of the periodJuan Pern
was deposed late in 1955Cinema Novo in Brazil came about partly
under the stimulation of the populism of Joo Goulart, vice president
during the government of Juscelino Kubitschek and then president from
1961 to 1964, when he was overthrown by a military coup. This political
atmosphere, one of the Cinema Novo directors, Ruy Guerra, has said,
provided a rationale within which it was possible for a number of young
directors centered in Rio de Janeiro to challenge both established Brazil-
ian commercial cinema and the European-oriented artistic production
coming out of So Paulo.8 But these are only the most prominent ex-
amples of the beginnings of a movement that developed in a number of
countries during the 1960s, in whatever way local conditions permitted,
and that came together for the rst time at a meeting of Latin American
lmmakers in Via del Mar in Chile in 1967.
Before the Revolution, conditions in Cuba were hardly more favor-
able than in most of the rest of Latin America. The lm that icaic re-
gards as its principal precursor, El Megano, dating from 1955, was made
in conditions of clandestinity and was seized at its rst screening by the
dictator Batistas secret police. However, the decree that established icaic
in 1959 was not, strictly speaking, a straightforward act of nationaliza-
tion. It envisaged an autonomous body, empowered to organize, estab-
lish, and develop a national lm industry, and it handed over to this
body properties and facilities connected with the lm business that
passed into the hands of the Revolutionary Government because their
owner, a certain Alonso, had been one of Batistas henchmen who ed
the country after the rebels took power. The decree empowered the new
body to take over other lm properties that might be further cons-
cated from members of the dictators entourage. Perhaps the acquisi-
tion of a studio egged the young revolutionaries on, except that they
had already been egged on precisely by the fact that the thing had been
in the hands of the tyranny they had been ghting. In fact, on close
examination, the decree that established icaic cannot be mistaken for
the kind of law that would be passed by a government that just hap-
 For the First Time 37

pened to acquire a lm studio and didnt really know what to do with it.
Both the preamble and the law itself clearly show that its authors under-
stood the character of the forces that had prevented the growth of an
independent lm industry in Cuba until then, and it contains an analy-
sis of the structure needed to set up an industry that might be able in
the future to escape those forces. The preamble begins by declaring cin-
ema an art, an instrument for the creation of individual and collective
consciousness, accordingly able to contribute to the deepening of the
revolutionary spirit and to feeding its creative inspiration. But then it
goes on clearly to speak of the need to establish an appropriate techni-
cal infrastructure and a distribution apparatus. In sum, the text tells us
a good deal about the political understanding, intelligence, and inten-
tions of its authors, members of the revolutionary vanguard that stood
behind the Provisional Government. This Provisional Government was
seen by the international media at the time as a novel kind of bourgeois-
nationalist social-democratic grouping, which was precisely the revolu-
tionaries purpose. This decree, though couched in language that does
not openly contradict such an impression, is, on closer examination,
good evidence that whatever the appearances, there were people at work
here intent on the creation of socialism.
But how far back should we go, trekking through the historical un-
dergrowth, in order to answer the question how it was that the Cuban
revolutionaries learned to place such a high value on cinema? What do
we need to know about the history of cinema in Cuba before 1959? What
do we need to know about the history of Cuba apart from its cinema,
and about the cultural and political history of the revolutionaries who
promoted the decree and set up icaic?
 CHAPTER TWO
Back to the Beginning

In 1972, a full-length documentary appeared ironically titled Viva la

Repblica (Long live the republic), directed by Pastor Vega. A historical
compilation juxtaposing a variety of old newsreels, photographs, polit-
ical cartoons, and similar visual material, and narrated with a wit that
makes the most of the very crudeness and limitations of such stu, the
lm elegantly traces the history of the republic set up under U.S. tutelage
at the beginning of the century, following the expulsion of the Spanish
after their defeat in the Cuban-Spanish-American War in 1898. Close to
the start we see two of the very earliest newsreels (actualities, as they
were then called), scenes of the war as issued by the Edison company.
One of them pictures Teddy Roosevelts Rough Riders disembarking on
the island. They were among the very rst lms to be shot in Cuba. Like
all the earliest lms, they are hardly more than moving photographs.
Brief and crude as they are, these fragments should not be underesti-
mated. However minimal they are as imagesthe camera remains dis-
tant from its subject and there is very little detailthey were already
capable of satisfying a more than simple demand by the audience for
spectacle, mere wonder at the magic of the moving image. They were
made not for Cuban audiences, but for those of North America in the
epoch of the robber barons, where, however naive, their interest had
been carefully nurtured by the new mass press of the dayespecially
by the two leading newspaper chains of Pulitzer and Hearst.
William Randolph Hearst provided the model for Charles Foster Kane

38
 Back to the Beginning 39

Roosevelts Rough Riders (Edison, 1898)

in Orson Welless famous rst lm Citizen Kane of 1940. A scene early in

the picture makes passing reference to the role of Hearsts New York
Journal (Kanes Inquirer in the lm) in fomenting popular encourage-
ment for the Cuban war. Kanes ex-guardian Thatcher protests at a
headline that reads Galleons of Spain o Jersey Coast. Is this really
your idea of how to run a newspaper? Thatcher asks Kane. You know
perfectly well theres not the slightest proof that this armada is o the Jer-
sey Coast. Bernstein, Kanes general manager, interrupts with a cable
from a correspondent called Wheeler whom Kane has sent to Cuba,
modeled on the real Richard Harding Davis sent by Hearst. Girls de-
lightful in Cuba stop, reads the cable. Could send you prose poems
about scenery but dont feel right spending your money stop. There is
no war in Cuba. Signed Wheeler. Any answer? asks Bernstein. Yes,
says Kane. Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose poems, Ill provide the
war. One of the ways Pulitzer and Hearst competed against each other
was by building sensationalist press campaigns around the Cuban War
of Independence.
 40 Back to the Beginning

This kind of real historical reference, and not just the lms virtuos-
ity, is one of the elements that made Citizen Kane a radical movie; yet its
attitude toward Cuban historyThere is no war in Cubais cavalier.
The newspapers of both press barons published releases by the Junta of
Cuban Exiles in the United States, from the moment it was established
in 1895 with the aim of winning recognition for Cuban belligerency. Peo-
ple certainly knew there was a war going on ninety miles from Miami
indeed, a revolutionand at that time, North Americans were not yet
afraid of the word. Their own revolutionary origins were still alive in
popular memory, and the Cubans attracted a good deal of sincere sym-
pathy. But they also attracted, says the North American historian Philip
Foner, elements . . . who viewed the Revolution as an issue suited to
their own purposes, such as American traders and investors who were
directly connected with Cuban aairs and wished to protect their trade
and investments in the island; expansionist elements who were seeking
foreign markets for manufactured goods and for the investment of sur-
plus capital; businessmen and politicians who cared nothing for the
revolutionary struggle in Cuba but saw in it an opportunity to divert
popular thinking away from the economic and social problems arising
from the depression which had begun in 1893; and newspaper publishers
who saw in the Cuban Revolution an opportunity to boost circulation.1
Throughout 1897 and 1898, atrocity stories owed north from the
island, both fabricated and exaggerated. Another historian: Vivid lan-
guage, striking sketches drawn by men who never left New York, lurid
details composed in bars and cafes mingled with the truth about Cuba
until the whole fabric dazzled millions into a stunned belief. Reporters
rescued damsels in distress and upheld the American ag in libuster-
ing expeditions. Artists furnished pictures from the palm-fringed isle
and toured incognito in the devastated cane elds and sickened
cities. . . . An elaborate system of spies and rumor mongers spread lies.2
When the uss Maine exploded in Havana harborit was moored
there supposedly on a goodwill visiton February 15, 1898, killing more
than 250 ocers and crew, the newspapers didnt wait for the naval re-
port on the cause of the explosion (which might just have been an acci-
dent). A few days earlier, Hearsts Journal had published a photographic
reproductionanother new technologyof a private letter by the Span-
ish ambassador in Washington insulting the American president. The
 Back to the Beginning 41

Journal now coined the slogan Remember the Maine, To hell with Spain
and oered fty thousand dollars for the detection of the perpetrators
of the Maine outrage. With more than eight pages devoted to the inci-
dent every day, the circulation of the Journal more than doubled in the
space of a week. In erce competition, Pulitzer sent deep-sea divers to
the scene of the wreck, and the circulation of his World also rose hugely.
The site of the wreck was lmed by Cubas own lm pioneer, Jos G.
Gonzlez. In France, Georges Mlis made a reconstruction of the scene,
typically delightful and fantastical, sh swimming around in a glass-walled
tank with a disproportionate cutout of a ship resting on the bottom.
As pressure for U.S. military intervention had mounted, wrote Albert
E. Smith in his autobiography, Two Reels and a Crank, he and his assis-
tant Blackton went to lm the preparations for war at Hoboken, where
New Yorks famous old 71st National Guard Regiment was gathered to
entrain for Tampa, assembly point for the invasion troops. We found
the soldiers shuing willy-nilly from ferryboat to train and called this
to the attention of an ocer. We cant take pictures of your boys strag-
gling along this way. You wouldnt want a New York audience to see this
sort of marching on the screen. The ocer assembled a hundred men
in tight lines of eight, marched them briskly by our camera.3 A reveal-
ing incident. Clearly, Smith had an eye for what constituted a proper
picture. And evidently even the earliest lmmakers knew they were doing
more than just taking moving snapshots. On the contrary, Smith was
already prepared to intervene here in order to produce a certain image;
he was ready to do a bit of stage managing, to work the image up in order
to get what we can properly call an ideological eect. (Notice, however,
that precisely the same kind of work is needed for what may also prop-
erly be termed the aesthetic labor required by the new art form.)
Nonetheless, the early lmmakers were often surprised by their own
worksomething that is bound to happen in any art form when the
frontiers of expression are under exploration. Because they were start-
ing from scratch, the creative conditions in which the early lmmakers
worked were precisely what artists in other media engaged in the mod-
ernist revolution were themselves looking for, but for them a struggle
was needed to explode the traditional parameters of expression and throw
the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment and reasoning into question.
There were all sorts of things, however, that lmmakers did spontaneously
 42 Back to the Beginning

and unselfconsciously that had precisely this eect, so that, in a strange

way, lm, which had no traditions because it was utterly new, was to be-
come the most deeply characteristic of modern art forms.
Albert Smith was taken by surprise at the very rst projection of his
images of the 71st. The lm was developed in time for a special show-
ing at Tony Pastors that night. One factor had escaped us, and we were
unprepared for the demonstration that took place. Public indignation
over the Maine had taken on another form. Now the public was crying
out its condence in American strength; the spirit of patriotism was a
rousing aria on every street corner. . . . That night at Pastors the audi-
ence, enthralled with the idea of a war with Spain, saw their boys march-
ing for the rst time on any screen. They broke into a thunderous storm
of shouting and foot stamping. Hats and coats lled the air. Never had
Pastors witnessed such a night!
Theodore Roosevelt was assistant secretary for the navy and one of
the strongest advocates of U.S. military intervention. Thanks to his great
zeal for publicity, Smith and Blackton soon found themselves traveling
to Cuba with the famous Rough Riders, a cavalry regiment, but on this
occasion unhorsed. Once there, Smith lmed them in action in what
came to be known as the Charge up San Juan Hill. Roosevelt, who knew
a thing or two about promoting his image, at one point in this charge
halted and struck a pose for the camera.
An hour or two out of port as they left the island with their lm in the
can, Smith and Blackton heard the low distant thunder of heavy guns.
In Florida, they learned that the Spanish admiral, bottled up in Santi-
ago de Cuba by U.S. warships, had tried to make a run for it. It was the
Fourth of July and the U.S. Navy had sunk the Spanish eet. New York
was buzzing with the news when they got back there. Unsure exactly
what their footage was like, they at rst resolved to keep mum about
what they had actually lmed. But reporters hungry for information
gathered round them and they were asked if they had shots of the sea
battle. At this precise moment, wrote Smith, ushed with triumph, I
think we would have taken credit for any phase of the Cuban campaign.
Certainly, certainly, I said, and Blackton nodded solemnly as if I had
spoken a simple irrefutable truth. . . . Once in our oce, we knew we
were in trouble. Word had spread through New York that Vitagraph had
taken pictures of the Battle of Santiago Bay.
 Back to the Beginning 43

The only way out, they decided, was to fake it. They bought large
sturdy photographs of ships of the U.S. and Spanish eets that were on
sale in the streets of New York. They cut them out and stood the cutouts
in water an inch deep in an inverted canvas-covered picture frame, with
blue tinted cardboard painted with clouds for a background. They nailed
the cutouts to small blocks of wood and placed small pinches of gun-
powder on the wooden blocks. They pulled the cutouts past the camera
with a ne thread and used cotton dipped in alcohol at the end of a wire,
thin enough to escape the cameras vision, to set o the gunpowder
charges. To complete the eect, assistants blew cigarette and cigar smoke
into the picture.
The result, seen today, is clearly a model, but not then: It would be
less than the truth to say we were not wildly excited at what we saw on
the screen, Smith continued. The smoky overcast and the ashes of
re from the guns gave the scene an atmosphere of remarkable realism.
The lm and the lenses of that day were imperfect enough to conceal
the crudities of our miniature, and as the picture ran for only two min-
utes there wasnt time for anyone to study it critically. Deception though
it was then, it was the rst miniature, and the forerunner of the elabo-
rate special eects techniques of modern picturemaking. Pastors and
both Proctor houses played to capacity audience for several weeks. Jim
[Blackton] and I felt less and less remorse of conscience when we saw
how much excitement and enthusiasm were aroused by The Battle of
Santiago Bay and the thirty-minute-long Fighting with Our Boys in Cuba.
Almost every newspaper in New York carried an account of the show-
ings, commenting on Vitagraphs remarkable feat in obtaining on-the-
spot pictures of these two historical events.
Smith and Blackton were not the only people to fake a Battle of
Santiago Bay. Two Cuban writers on cinema, Sara Calvo and Alejandro
Armengol, mention another in a passage on the relations between poli-
tics and the newborn lm business:

The principal North American companiesEdison, Biograph, and

Vitagraphexploited this war for ideological, political, and economic
ends. Biograph enjoyed the nancial assistance of the future President
McKinley, at that time governor of Ohio. This company, under the ag
of the Monroe slogan, provided the politicians personal propaganda and
was to specialize in actuality and documentary material. Vitagraph was
 44 Back to the Beginning

Tearing Down the Spanish Flag in 1898, on the day hostilities between
Spain and the United States broke out. Scarcely had military operations
begun than hundreds of copies of fake documentaries on the war were
circulating through America. One of the most famous was shot in
Chicago by Edward H. Amet, using models and a bathtub to show the
naval battle. . . . Amet dealt with the problem that the battle had occur-
red at night by claiming very seriously that he had a lm supersensitive
to the light of the moon and a telephoto lens capable of recording
images at a hundred kilometers distance. It is said that the Spanish
government managed to acquire a copy of such an important graphic
document for its archives.4

Neither such supersensitive lm nor telephoto lens existed thenthey

have only been developed recently for use in surveillance satellitesbut
it seems that the question didnt even occur to the press in New York.
Calvo and Armengol conclude that lms like this oered a stereotyped
image of the war, devoid of the participation of the Cubans, who suf-
fered discrimination and not a few humiliations in the struggle.
It is not dicult to understand why audiences should have been taken
in by faked images. Smith makes it clear in what he writes that whatever
the publicity claims of the early lm business about the way the cinemato-
graph reproduced the world in all its detail and sharpness, the early lm-
makers themselves were quite aware of the limitations of their appara-
tus. Audiences, however, had nothing eectively to compare with these
images that might reveal them as fakes, except perhaps for photographs.
But photographs were not a sucient test. Apart from any other consid-
eration, photographs themselves carried an ideological charge that also
contributed to the inclination of the audience to see the war uncritically.
Photographs of countries like Cubaeverywhere in the Americas south
of the Rio Grandegenerally came into the category of the exotic. The
very idea of the exotic is a creation of imperialism. It expresses the point
of view of the metropolis toward its periphery. The concept of exoticism
identies the gulf between the self-proclaimed civilization of the metrop-
olis and ways of life beyond it: primitive societies full of strange and un-
familiar features, the stranger the more interestingas Georg Lukcs
once observed, speaking of certain nineteenth-century French novels
like the curious use of dogs milk and ies feet as cosmetics.
The history of the exotic image goes back to the 1590s, when Theodore
de Bry published more than a dozen volumes of engravings of the Great
Voyages, the Historia Americae. Between them, de Bry and the authors
 Back to the Beginning 45

of the accounts whose drawings he copied gave visual form to the world
discovered by the conquistadores, enfolding it within the mythological
vision of a Europe still emerging from the Middle Ages. The fantastical
images of Historia Americae wove spells over those who looked upon
them. They evidently included Shakespeare, who doubtless found de
Bry in the library of one of his patrons. Describing one of the most
haunting of these images, he has Othello speak of

travels history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven
........................................
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. (Act 1, scene 3)

Perhaps there is even an intimation in his last play, The Tempest, where
he repeats the image of the men whose heads stood in their breasts,
that the strange forms and behavior of which these images tell are the
projections of the colonizersa reaction to encountering, in those they
proceeded to conquer, creatures disturbingly like themselves who none-
theless, like his own creation Caliban, did not t their own ideas of what
it is to be human.
The image of the exotic undergoes a transformation and intensica-
tion in the nineteenth century with the coming of photography, not just
because of the new conditions for the production of images, but also
because photography became a vehicle of nineteenth-century empiricism.
The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured
by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from
the very beginning, writes Susan Sontag. Gazing on other peoples
reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiq-
uitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends class inter-
ests, as if its perspective is universal.5 The camera collects the facts. A
Frenchman with a daguerreotype was already roaming the Pacic in
1841, two years after the invention of photography had been announced
to the world. Painters soon realized how the camera would undermine the
credibility of their foreign landscapes and adopted it as an ally instead.
Already in 1841 in Mexico, Frederick Catherwood took photographs in
Yucatn, where he had been painting for several years. And in 1844,
 46 Back to the Beginning

From Theodore de Bry, Historia Americae (1590s)

Arago, the man who persuaded the French parliament to purchase the
invention for the nation because of its scientic importance, promoted
a daguerreotype expedition to photograph the aborigines of Brazil. The
very authenticity of such images contributed to their exoticism, because
of the lack of any context in which to read them. As a scientist, the early
photographer was locked into the tabulating methods of empiricism,
engaged in making inventories of everything, and the naturalism of the
camera tted; this was a dierent form of endeavor from, say, the imag-
inative synthesis, in Darwin, of the theoretical naturalist. The photo-
graphic intelligence in its infancy was more like that of the utilitarian
minister with Bible in one hand, magnifying glass in the other (in E. P.
Thompsons phrase), whose illusion of productivity in the pursuit of
knowledge consisted in nothing more than the patient assembly of de-
tail upon detail without ever being able to show their connections. In
 Back to the Beginning 47

the same dissociated way, the exotic image made no connection with the
immediate reality of those who looked upon it. The camera conquered
geographical, but not cultural, distance.
With the coming of moving images, venturing to obtain the exotic
image for the audience back home went hand in hand with opening up
a market for the invention in the countries of the exotic themselves. Mov-
ing pictures were rst brought to Cuba by Gabriel Veyre, agent for the
French company of Lumire Frres, early in 1897. He arrived in Havana
from Mexico, where he had unveiled the cinmatographe on August 14,
1896eight months after its Paris debut, six months after another
Lumire agent, Flicien Trewey, introduced it in London. The Lumires
sent a team of agents around the world on planned itineraries designed
to sweep up on the fascination the new invention created everywhere,
preferably in advance of competitorsthe Havana debut of the cin-
matographe on January 24 was quickly followed by the arrival from the
United States of Edisons version on February 13 and the rival North
American Biograph on April 10. The Lumire machine served as both
projector and camera and the agents were briefed to bring back scenes
from the countries they visited. Since these lms were developed on the
spot, they were also exhibited immediately, and thus provided the rst
examples of local imagery in moving pictures. In Mexico, Veyre lmed
at least thirty scenes, ranging from the president and his entourage to
local dancing and groups of Indians. In Cuba, as a condition of being
allowed into the country, he was required by the Spanish authorities to
take military propaganda scenes, views of the artillery in action, and of
troops on the march.6
The content of the images of the Cuban-Spanish-American War was,
above all, the projection of the power of the statelike the content ever
since of the images of U.S. landings in Latin America, from Nicaragua
in the 1920s to Grenada in 1983. The spectacle of war, of the military,
and of state displaycoronations, state visits, imperial ceremonialwere
all popular subjects in early cinema. (British lmmakers excelled at the
ceremonials, but they also made eective lms of the Boer War, where
Smith contributed his expertise too.) For, as Thomas Hobbes once
observed, power is the reputation of power. It was sucient for early
audiences to be presented with the crudest images, little more than the
reputation of the reputation, and they were engaged by them. If scenes
 48 Back to the Beginning

like these became a genre, an established term in the vocabulary of

screen rhetoric, this is because they functioned rst and foremost not
on the level of information but like religious icons: they aroused the de-
votion of an audience to an idea.
This is the source of some of lms rst ideological functions, and it
comes from something more than the automatism of the camera, its
mechanical capacity to record whatever its exposed toas Albert E.
Smith, for one, realized very rapidly. Yet, although Smiths fakery was
deliberate, it is not that it arose exactly from a desire to deceive, or only
in a supercial sense. The invention of the miniature was a discovery
in what the medium lent itself to, as well as an organic response to an
eager audience that made the lmmakers feel they were only satisfying a
natural demand. And they were. Because, in consuming moving pic-
tures, the audience stimulated their production not merely economically
but also, through their ready surrender of self to the content of the image,
on the level of symbolic exchange.
This does not, however, authorize us to say that the ideological eects
of lm were ingrained in the image itself, as if they were part of the
chemical process. In fact, they arise in the relationship of the screen
with the audience, in the space between the screen and the spectator. The
ideological disposition of commercial cinema saw to it that the emerg-
ing screen vocabulary was formalized and pressed into service in ways
that seemed to lock the ideological message onto the screen. Nevertheless,
it would be a very undialectical approach that took the eects of lm to
be so xedand the relationship of the screen to the audience to be so
mechanicalthat they cannot change with dierent audiences and in
dierent situations and circumstances. Pastor Vegas Viva la Repblica is
a lm that plays on this possibility, in particular on the altered perspec-
tive of an audience that has seen the Revolution triumph and then the
defeat of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs sponsored by the cia, which
left the reputation of U.S. power irretrievably tarnished.
Cubas revolutionary cinema has sought to undermine that power
further, by building on the audiences new attitude toward the screen to
create both a more critical disposition in the audience and a radical lm
language. The experience both of guerrilla warfare and of the popular
militia that the Revolution created after it took power provides the un-
derpinning for a number of lms that use experimental cinematic tech-
 Back to the Beginning 49

niques explicitly to demystify the iconography of warfare as portrayed

in conventional Hollywood cinema. Over the same years that saw the
invention of lm, Cuban patriots were engaged in a war of liberation
against Spain, a struggle dating back to 1868. The events of that year are
re-created in La primera carga al machete (The rst machete charge),
directed by Manuel Octavio Gmez, one of the lms that icaic pro-
duced at the end of the 1960s to celebrate one hundred years of struggle.
Highly experimental both visually and narratively, shot in black and
white to imitate the high contrast of very early lm stocks, it is con-
structed as if it were a piece of contemporary documentary reportage
on the events, including interviews with the participants, and sections
of explanatory exposition.
But it is not as if the conventional iconography of warfare was a secret.
Albert E. Smiths account of his Cuban adventure includes a pertinent
comment on the way the image of the Charge up San Juan Hill came to
be embroidered: Many historians have given it a Hollywood avor, but
there was vastly more bravery in the tortuous advance against this enemy
who could see and not be seen. In other words, not only does the Holly-
wood image not correspond to reality, but it overdramatizes; intending
to produce the image of superheroism, it ends up negating the quiet
heroism of the real situation. (Ironically, this is often also true of the
antiwar movie.) To expose these genres for what they are, the Cubans
have also produced lms such as Manuel Herreras feature-length docu-
mentary reconstruction of the Bay of Pigs, Girn, made in 1972, a lm
testimonial that builds up an account of what happened through the
recollections not of experts, analysts, and leaders, but of ordinary people
who made their contributions on the day and then returned to their
regular lives. Their testimonies are lmed in the real locations of the
events, and the lm reconstructs their stories behind them as they speak.
A member of the militia at the time of the invasion remembers the
moment when he had to throw a hand grenade for the rst time: I
tried to pull the pin out with my teeth, because I thought I would try
and copy what they did in the cinema, but that way Id only have bro-
ken my jawbone. I realized that using your teeth is strictly for the
movies . . . And to top it o, a woman then relates how she too imitated
the movies: she was on her way with a message to headquarters from
her militia unit, walking along a beach, when she heard suspicious
 50 Back to the Beginning

noises, which she was afraid might have been invading mercenaries. To
be sure they wouldnt get the message if they captured her, she decided
shed better eat it. It was harder to chew, she says, than she expected.
Cuban cinema has not always abandoned the portrayal of war in the
idealized forms of genre cinema. A number of lms, like El brigadista,
set out to use, rather than subvert, the iconography of Hollywood. They
are not dishonest lms, but they sometimes run into trouble, repro-
ducing unwanted elements of genre uncritically, like El brigadistas
reinforcement of the individual macho hero. La primera carga al machete
and Girn, however, are lms of a dierent instinct, more central to the
development of icaic, which is to try and relocate the point of view of
the lm upon the narrative that it relates, in order to nd ways to com-
municate the popular experience of real situations without falling into
the traps of populism.
The invention of cinematography had required a lengthy period of
gestation, but once achieved, its basic principles were easily enough
grasped by people anywhere who had moderate mechanical skills, no
more than a smattering of scientic knowledge, and some acquaintance
with photography. This combination existed wherever the machines of
the industrial revolution had penetrated, and the task of maintaining
and repairing them had produced practical knowledge. The lines of com-
munication with the metropolis brought the rest. Local lmmakers took
no longer to appear in Cuba than in most of Latin America. English
machinery came into use on the sugar plantations in the 1830s, and in-
creasing trade with the United States after the mid-century made much
of the latest mechanical equipment available. A Spanish traveler found
a U.S.-made sewing machine in a remote Cuban village as early as 1859.
One of the men who lmed the scene of the sinking of the Maine, Jos
G. Gonzlez, tried his hand, like many lm pioneers the world over, at
many things. He constructed, for example, illuminated commercial signs.
He had a competitor who apparently attempted to project signs onto
clouds in the sky, an idea subsequently toned down to projection onto
the facades of buildings, as was done in London in the early 1890s. A
fancy anecdote, perhaps, but it shows that the principles of the magic
lantern were perfectly well known in Havanasimilarly, the other fash-
ionable forms of popular visual entertainment. At the moment lm made
its Cuban debut there were, in the city, numerous photographic estab-
 Back to the Beginning 51

lishments and a couple of Panoramasthe Panorama Soler specialized

in war scenes, and other optical illusions were on display at the Saln de
variedades. There was also a range of temporary and open-air attractions.
After their intervention against Spain, the North American style of
urban commercialism was transmitted rapidly to Havana. Havana had
always been an open city, a busy port on the routes in and out of desti-
nations throughout the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, a cosmopol-
itan city open to European inuences. It had suered occupation by
the British in 1762, but culturally much more important was the French
presence during the nineteenth century in Louisiana and in Mexico.
(There are even Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, starring such
people as Nelson Eddy, in which expatriate French aristocrats roam the
Caribbean from New Orleans to Martinique.) The mark of French cul-
ture survived in Cuba right into the twentieth century, but at the mo-
ment when cinema was born, Havana was poised to pass under North
American inuence, which, though already present, intensied greatly
with the establishment of the Republic. The early years of the century
saw the Havana bourgeoisie coming increasingly under the sway of North
American ideas and uneasy with the revolutionary nationalism to be
found particularly in the eastern parts of the island. Following the de-
feat of the Spanish, the United States left a military government in Cuba
that tried to resist nationalist pressures but was forced, after two years,
to call a constituent assembly to draw up a constitution for a new re-
public. This assembly was expressly instructed to make provision in the
constitution for U.S.Cuban relations, which it initially declined to do
on the grounds that such provisions had no place in a constitution. But
there were forces in Washington determined to curb patriotic resistance
on the island and ensure that the constitution gave formal recognition
to their demands. Their only concern was to give their threats and ulti-
matums a semblance of legality. This was contrived by means of an
amendment to an army appropriation bill that carried the name of Sen-
ator Platt, and which stated the conditions the United States would re-
quire to see fullled before the occupation was ended. The Platt Amend-
ment fooled nobody. There was a certain amount of doubletalk about
just intentions, but the Washington Post, in those days a Republican and
pro-administration paper, oered the truth. An editorial under the head-
line Let Us Be Honest declared:
 52 Back to the Beginning

Foolishly or wisely, we want these newly acquired territories, not for any
missionary or altruistic purpose, but for the trade, the commerce, the
power and the money that are in them. Why beat about the bush and
promise and protest all sorts of things? Why not be honest. It will pay.
Why not tell the truth and say what is the factthat we want Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Luzon [all acquired through the defeat of the
Spanish] . . . because we believe they will add to our national strength
and because they will some day become purchasers at our bargain
counters?7

The Constitutional Assembly acceded to the Platt Amendment by only

a narrow majority, but it was the Havana bourgeoisie with its north-
ward orientation that won the day with the argument that conditional
independence was better than continued occupation. In Europe, Cuba
was now seen as a U.S. dependency. Following ocial independence
celebrations on May 20, 1902, the London Saturday Review commented:
It is true that the American troops and ocials have been withdrawn, the
American ag hauled down, and a republic of sorts inaugurated. But it is
not true that the republic is independent even in the management of its
internal aairs, while so far as foreign relations go, it is undisguisedly
under the thumb of Washington. The republic has been obliged to cede
naval and coaling stations to the United States; it has no power to declare
war without American consent; it may not add to the Cuban debt with-
out permission; even its control over the island treasury is subject to
supervision. Moreover, the United States retains a most elastic right
of intervention.8

That right was exercised twice in the following decade, between 1906
and 1909 and again in 1912.
This was the atmosphere in which the rst lmmakers in Cuba began
to work. Compared with, say, Mexican cinema, Cuba was a bit slow o
the mark, but this is probably only because the market was so much
smaller. Nevertheless, and despite the dierence in size, the two coun-
tries show similar characteristics, most of them typical of early lm
activity almost anywhere, such as the links with fairground entertain-
ment and popular comic and musical theater. They also share a trait
that is frequently overlooked, a link between early cinema and advertis-
ing. The uses of lm in Mexico constituted, even before the turn of the
century, a catalog of initiatives in the techniques of marketing. In 1899,
for example, the newspaper El Imparcial was oering its readers free
lm shows if they smoked a certain brand of cigarettes. Another paper,
 Back to the Beginning 53

El Nacional, reported in the very year lm arrived in Mexico1896a

project to set up temporary premises in the city center with free lm
shows of vistas pintorescas (picturesque views) nanced by including
color-slide advertisements in the program.
There is a temptation to call such examples prophetic, for the way they
seem to anticipate the symbiotic relationship between program and ad-
vertisement in commercial broadcasting, but there is also something odd
about them, because lm wasnt destined to develop in this way. Radio
and television learned to make advertisements pay for programs because
they are forms of diusion where you cant make the audience pay di-
rectly, or couldnt until pay-TV was developed. There are, of course, other
methods available to pay for broadcastinglicences, sponsorship, state
subsidyand the methods each country chooses are politically signi-
cant. In the same way, it says something about conditions in Mexico
that such harebrained schemes were thought up for the early lm. It
says that lm found it dicult there for some reason to capture the audi-
ence that awaited it; and the reason must be an economic oneproba-
bly the fact that the vast majority of people had hardly any spare cash to
spend on such things, and therefore needed special inducement. Condi-
tions for working people in the metropolis, bad though they were, were
already better than this: the last quarter of the nineteenth century had
brought, in countries like England, a real increase in purchasing power.
Most of the desirable conditions for launching lm successfully could
be found in most Latin American countries, and its early development
took place in similar circumstances across the continent. In Cuba, too,
there was a close link, from the start, with the ideology of marketing.
One of the very few early Cuban lms of which records survive is El brujo
desapareciendo (The disappearing magician)the title suggests that it
must have been a trick lm of the kind that was typical of early cinema.
It was made, prior to 1906, by a certain Jos E. Casass. Casass was a
pioneering exhibitor who began his career traveling around the island
with an Edison projector and a portable electric generator, exactly like
the town hall showmen in Britain at the same time. This lm turned
out quite successfullycopies were purchased by the French Lumire
company, and by Edison in the United States. But it was made with
money subscribed by a beer merchant.
In 1906, to celebrate the opening of Cubas rst purpose-built cinema,
the Teatro Actualidades (Theater of actualities), another pioneer, Enrique
 54 Back to the Beginning

Daz Quesada, made a scenic lm, La Habana en agosto 1906 (Havana in

August 1906), and, in the same year, El Parque de Palatino (Palatino
Park), showing scenes of Havanas principal entertainment park. The
Cuban lm historian J. M. Valds Rodrguez described this second lm as
a distinct achievement that at moments conveyed irony and humor.9
It seems, nevertheless, precisely in this lm that an ideological fusion
with the function of publicity took place: the lm was commissioned by
the entertainments park company for its publicity campaigns in the
United States. Two years later, Daz Quesada made another lm in the
same vein, whose title was quite explicit: Un turista en la Habana (A
tourist in Havana). Obviously, these lms presented a highly selective
picture of the city, since they were meant to show it as a commodity on
the tourist market.
But this would hardly have required any great eort on the part of any-
one with the minimum photogenic sense of the time. The link between
tourism and photography was well established. Susan Sontag calls this
the predatory side of photography, and it follows upon the exploitation
of the exotic. The alliance between photography and tourism, she says,
becomes evident in the United States earlier than anywhere else:

After the opening of the West in 1869 by the completion of the trans-
continental railroad came the colonization through photography.
The case of the American Indians is the most brutal. Discreet, serious
amateurs like Vroman had been operating since the end of the Civil War.
They were the vanguard of an army of tourists who arrived by the end of
the century, eager for a good shot of Indian life. The tourists invaded
the Indians privacy, photographing holy objects and the sacred dances
and places, if necessary paying the Indians to pose and getting them to
revise their ceremonies to provide more photogenic material.10

The selective and tendentious imagery that is produced in this kind

of cultural operation cannot escape having an invisible shadow, the
underside of the innocuous attractions of tourism, and of the mysteries
of the exoticthe menace of what these constructs render invisible, like
the underworld pictured by Francis Ford Coppola at the end of God-
father II, where Havana is a city prostituted to the gangsterism of the
brothel, the sex show, and the gambling den. It was, indeed, an ineluctable
part of the citys image, which Graham Greene satirized in his spoof spy
novel Our Man in Havana. It has also been captured by a Cuban director,
scar Valds, in a lm made in 1973 called El extrao caso de Rachel K.
 Back to the Beginning 55

(The strange case of Rachel K.), a ctionalized account of an incident

that occurred in 1931, when a French variety dancer was murdered dur-
ing an orgy attended by politicians and prominent society leaders. A
few years later, President Roosevelt was advising the Cubans to clean the
city up, but the corruption only grew, until the maosi were able to
congratulate each other (in Coppolas depiction) for nding in Cuba
what they couldnt nd in the United Statesa government prepared
to work with them as partners.
 CHAPTER THREE
The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

Jos Casass and Enrique Daz Quesada were not the only Cuban lm
pioneers who made commissioned publicity lms. In 1906, Manuel
Martnez Illas made a picture about sugar manufacture called Cine y
azcar (Cinema and sugar). It was sponsored by the Manat Sugar Com-
pany, which was in the process of trying to raise further capital. Now
sugar was Cubas principal crop. The island was not quite monocultural;
tobacco and coee were also important export crops. But it was above
all sugar that was responsible for Cubas economic deformation, the im-
balance in its productive forces that created so much poverty and misery.
It would not be possible to understand the peculiar susceptibility of the
Cuban lm pioneers to commercial sponsorship without considering
the eects of the pursuit of sugar on ideological and cultural disposi-
tions in nineteenth-century Cuba.
A number of lms produced by the Cuban lm institute during the
1970samong them Sergio Girals trilogy, El otro Francisco (The other
Francisco), Rancheador (Slave hunter), and Maluala, and Toms Guti-
rrez Aleas La ltima cena (The Last Supper)investigate the nineteenth-
century Cuban social formation and the role of sugar in shaping its
character, and that of the dierent social classes by which it was consti-
tuted. The picture these lms combine to produce is of a deeply trou-
bled colonial slave society with a class of largely Spanish-born planta-
tion owners, grimly determined to prevent the overthrow of their rule by
slave rebellion as in Haiti. Their attitudes, opinions, and political alliances
were all directed to this end, with the consequence that while Bolvar

56
 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage 57

and his followers brought independence from Spain on the mainland,

powerful forces in Cuba preferred to keep the island under Spanish rule
and maintain the institution of slavery.
A dissident group, however, began to appear within the landowning
class in the 1830s, which linked up with the emerging creole bourgeoisie
in the belief that slavery was holding back the islands modernization.
But precisely because Cuba was still under colonial rule, the creole bour-
geoisie was unable to constitute itself as a fully edged national oligarchy;
and the country was exposed to the highest levels of exploitation not
only by the Spanish colonial power but increasingly by her competitors.
Opposition to the Spanish grew progressively more militant, and, spear-
headed by the ercely independent coee-growing small landowners
who were largely concentrated in the eastern part of the island, a War of
Independence broke out in 1868. In the rst phase of this struggle, the
independence movement was defeated. The Cuban historian Francisco
Lpez Segrera suggests that these circumstances encouraged the creole
bourgeoisie, who owned less than a third of the riches of the oligarchy
as a whole, and lacked the solid foundations for political activity, to
play the role of intermediary with competing foreign capital, simply in
order to defend its position.1
Yet, paradoxically, Cubas historical idiosyncrasies served not so much
to distinguish it from the rest of Latin America as to intensify a number
of traits that could be found throughout the continent, especially in
relation to cultural experience and behavior. The process of cultural de-
velopment in Latin America does not t easily into European terms of
explanation. The Peruvian Jos Carlos Maritegui (founder of the Peru-
vian Communist Party), in a seminal work published in 1928, Siete
ensayos de interpretacin de la realidad peruana (Seven essays of inter-
pretation of Peruvian reality), puts aside both the standard bourgeois
periodization of art into the Classical, the Baroque, the Romantic, and
so forth, and also the orthodox Marxist classication of feudal or aris-
tocratic, bourgeois, and then proletarian art, because neither of these
systems is appropriate either to Peru itself or to Latin America as a
whole. Instead, he suggests his own brilliantly simple schema: he distin-
guishes three periods, the colonial, the cosmopolitan, and the national. In
the rst, the literature of the country concerned is not that of its own
people but of the conquistador. It is an already evolved literature trans-
planted into the colony, where it usually continues to exert an inuence
 58 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

beyond the overthrow of the colonial power. During the second period,
which is ushered in by the establishment of the independent republic,
elements from various foreign literatures are assimilated simultaneously,
and the unique cultural hold of the original colonial power is broken.
Finally, in the third period, which implicitly only arrives with proper
economic as well as political independence, a people achieves a well-
developed expression of its own personality and its own sentiments.2
The transition to cosmopolitanism in these new republics is clearly
echoed in Cuba even though it remained a colony. The rst manifesta-
tions of a new Cuban literature date from the end of the 1830s when a
number of short-lived literary journals appeared and the rst Cuban
novels were written. Just as elsewhere in Latin America, they reveal the
inuence of European Romanticismfor instance, the novel Francisco
by Anselmo Surez y Romero, unpublished till later in the century, on
which Sergio Girals El otro Francisco is based.
At the same time as these cultural developments, the creole bourgeoisie
in many places succumbed to the doctrines of free trade that the British
were seeking to impose upon the continent. The Chilean historian Clau-
dio Vliz has suggested that the acceptance of foreign economic prin-
ciples was due primarily not to intellectual conviction but to the com-
mon sense of self-interest: payment for exports was made in foreign
currency, which allowed the exporters to purchase both machinery to
expand production, and manufactured and high-quality consumer goods,
all at very low prices. They were advantages that favored increasing pri-
vate consumption and sumptuary display. As Vliz puts it:
They clothed their cowboys with ponchos of English annel, rode in
saddles made by the best harnessmakers of London, drank authentic
champagne and lighted their mansions with Florentine lamps. At night
they slept in beds made by excellent English cabinet makers, between
sheets of Irish linen and covered by blankets of English wool. Their silk
shirts came from Italy and their wives jewels from London, Paris and
Rome.3

And, of course, they sent their children to Europe to be educated, just as

they nowadays send them to the United States.
The Cuban bourgeoisie was in no way deprived of similar progress
just because it remained colonial. Of course, the cultural conguration
of the island took its own form. The inuence of the English was rather
less than in many Latin American countries, and that of the French rather
 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage 59

stronger, both because of the inux into Cuba of French whites eeing
the Haitian revolution and then the renewed French presence in the re-
gion during their period of rule in Mexico. But, in any case, by the
1840s, according to the Cuban literary historian Ambrosio Fornet (who
became icaics literary adviser and worked on a number of lm scripts,
both ction and documentary), by the 1840s social life demanded new
and more sophisticated forms of consumption, similar to those of the
great European capitals: the privileged classes enjoyed their leisure at
soires and operatic performances where they could show o how well
informed they were, at least according to the dictates of fashion and the
latest news.4
As the most leisured sector of the leisured classes, women played an
important role in this process, making themselves socially useful in the
only sphere of activity allowed them. Already in 1829 there was a Cuban
journal called La Moda o Recreo Semanal del Bello Sexo (Fashion or the
weekly amusement of the fair sex). Its pages included salon musicsongs
and contradanzasand pleasurable literature. From then on, says
Fornet, no journal could manage without lavishing its attention on lit-
erature, which now became another item of sumptuary consumption.
The success of the Romantics in Europe helped make literature fashion-
able in Cuba, creating a new market and a new merchandise.
Conrming the link between fashion and literature, the editor of La
Moda was a leading literary gure, Domingo del Monte, the host in
years to come of the literary circle that succored the rst generation of
Cuban novelists. The opening scene of El otro Francisco takes place in
del Montes salon. Del Monte has invited Surez y Romero to read his
new novel to a visiting Englishman by the name of Richard Madden, an
agent of the British government with a commission to investigate viola-
tions of the treaty between Britain and Spain on the suppression of the
slave trade. The members of del Montes circle were liberal intellectuals
opposed to slavery and in favor of social reform: Francisco is the rst
antislavery novel written in Cuba. The image of the slave that the novel
presents is a romantic onethe lm is called The Other Francisco
because it sets out to show what the suering hero, the slave Francisco,
might have been like, what kind of life he would really have led, had he
been a historical gure. But the members of del Montes salon were nei-
ther unworldly nor unversed in the realities. Between the scenes in the
lm that narrate the novel and reconstruct it to show the contrast between
 60 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

romantic ction and historical reality, we are shown the progress of

Maddens investigations (the dierent strands come together in a bril-
liantly imaginative stroke, when Madden, traveling around the island,
visits a plantation where he meets the characters in the novel). In one of
these scenes, Madden is conversing with del Monte:
madden: Tell me, del Monte, how many whites and blacks are there on
the island?
del monte: 300,000 whites and 500,000 colored; 250,000 of them
slaves.
madden: Will abolition have an eect on the sugar industry?
del monte: Well, so far the slaves are necessary, but with the process
of mechanization, importing new ones will go against progress.
madden: If the problem were in your hands, what would be your
solution?
del monte: In the rst place, the immediate end of the slave trade.
Then, the gradual elimination of slavery.
madden: How do the enlightened white creoles look upon
independence?
del monte: Any utterance in favor of independence involves the end
of slavery. Right now it would earn us the hatred of the white popula-
tion. . . . Remember that here even the poorest families have slaves.
madden: Does Spain have the power to suppress the slave trade on the
island?
del monte: More than sucient.
madden: And the desire to do so?
del monte: None whatsoever.
madden: Then, its fear of the blacks that holds back pro-independence
feeling?
del monte: Yes, thats the fear.

Literature, in this Cuba, had become a fashionable commodity, but

there was little cultural sensibility among the majority of the dominant
class that made up its market, no real cultural awareness, because there
was no preparedness to admit critical thinking. Only in the interstices
of the growth of luxury consumption, like del Montes literary salon,
did any authentic cultural production take place within the cultured
 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage 61

El otro Francisco (Sergio Giral, 1974)

classes. For a creole bourgeoisie of this kindand this is a trait that

Cuba only reveals more starkly than elsewherethe attitude of vul-
gar Marxists that art is nothing more than a form of luxury consump-
tion turns out ironically to be a true description. Culture for them was
indeed on a par with linen sheets and silk shirtsthe very antithesis of
culture as Maritegui understands it, an active agent and expressive force
within society. But this, of course, is not the kind of culture you can ac-
quire by buying it. The culture you buy doesnt stick.
It doesnt stick because the only thing going on in such a transaction
is the imitation of outward forms of behavior. The model, for example,
for the sociocultural role of women was already well established in Lon-
don, Paris, and other European cities. There, women exerted vigorous
leadership in the bourgeois salons in a manner corresponding to the
nature of the bourgeois family: the wife presided over the gathering,
introduced the guests, and led the conversation. The daughters of the
family were among the performers because playing an instrument was
an accomplishment that demonstrated their eligibility for marriage.
The discussion of fashion was a topic of the salon because dierent
styles of dress were deemed appropriate to dierent types of event. The
Cuban bourgeoisie simply copied all this, though rather than fashion
 62 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

being an extension of the salon, the salon became an extension of fash-

ion, a place to show o dresses brought back like trophies from trips to
Europe. The portrayal of a salon in the second lm of Sergio Girals
trilogy, Rancheador, captures the style of the thing to a tee. It was the
development of cultured musical life in Cuba after about 1810 that pro-
vided one of the principal routes of entry for European Romantic liter-
ature. Madame de Stal, Chateaubriand, and Lord Byron, Alejo Carpen-
tier tells us, were the main authors to inspire the Cuban romances that
were sung in the salons.5
But by the time the products of European culture had crossed the
seas, they had lost the originality or polemical signicance they may have
started o by possessing. Indeed, very little was left except the function
of being a social commodity that could be circulated and cashed in, in
order to acquire social status, such as the status that went with hosting
the salon. The consequences of this reduction of the symbolic values of
cultural objects to the narrowest social exchange value can be seen in
the fate of Cuban literature in the course of the nineteenth century. The
appearance of a number of literary journals and novels at the end of the
1830s marks the beginning of a national literary renaissance that never
fullled its promise. There is very little continuity between this brief
owering of literary sensibilities and the appearance of the modernista
poets at the end of the century. Ambrosio Fornet tells us that the liter-
ary journals that appeared at the end of the 1830s had all disappeared by
the beginning of 1841, unable to sustain their subscriptions.
The journals demonstrated the existence of a literary market, but the
beneciaries turned out to be not the publishers of journals and books,
but the newspapers, which only had to concede space to literature amid
the advertisements and mercantile announcements to take this market
over. They began to publish novels in installments. These were not, how-
ever, auspicious conditions for literary development, as the papers found
it both cheaper and safer to reprint foreign successes rather than risk
publication of new and untried works by Cuban authorssafer espe-
cially ideologically. Cuban authors, like so many others throughout Latin
America, tended toward radical liberalism, and there was even more of
a danger in Cuba that the readership would refuse to patronize these
works. It was safer, too, to avoid courting censorship. The result was
that the market was de-Cubanized, and the Cuban author lost contact
with the wider audience.
 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage 63

This situation persisted during the second half of the century and
formed the background to the emergence of modernismo. (The move-
ment took its name from the description by the Nicaraguan poet Rubn
Daro, in 1890, of the new spirit which today quickens a small but proud
and triumphant group of writers and poets in Spanish America.)6 The
Mexican modernista poet Amado Nervo complained that in general in
Mexico, one writes for those who write. The literary man counts on a
coterie of the selected few who read him and end up as his only public.
The gros public, as the French say, neither pays nor understands, how-
ever simply he writes. What can be more natural than that he should
write for those who, even if they dont pay, at least read him?7 Not sur-
prisingly, this only increased the writers predilection for a kind of aes-
theticism that was already well developed in Europe. Combining a vari-
ety of European stylistic inuences, modernismo is a ne example of
Mariteguis cosmopolitanism, but also a highly sophisticated one.
The modernistas imported into Latin America the style of the bo-
hemian, and undoubtedly they show a certain degree of dependency on
their European inuences. But, at the same time, in adopting bohemi-
anism, the modernistas were attacking the dependency and conformism
of the creole bourgeoisie, claiming the right, even if they couldnt earn a
living at it, to live like writers and artists, and asserting the needs and
possibilities of cultural self-determination. Moreover, they carried their
project through not just with great aplomb but with imaginative origi-
nality. The manner in which they chose their paradigms and combined
their features created an entirely new aesthetic synthesis that it would
be appropriate to call syncretistic. Syncretism is not a word that will be
found in a dictionary of literary terms, though Latin American literary
and cultural critics have long employed the concept. It is borrowed from
anthropology, where it was applied to the process of synthesis of reli-
gious symbolism in Latin America over the period of the Conquest. The
imposition of Catholicism did not succeed in simply displacing pre-
Columbian cosmologies and their corresponding symbols and practices.
Nor was Catholicism simply overlaid upon them. A fusion took place in
which the new symbolism was interpreted through the old and ac-
quired some of its attributes and functions, creating a new level of sig-
nication fusing elements of both. The small protective three-pronged
cross that adorns peasant houses in the Andes symbolizes both the
Catholic Trinity and a mythology of three that comes from the Incas.
 64 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

Modernismo was the product of a similar process in aesthetic shape:

more than an imitative combination of dierent stylistic elements, but
their fusion in a poetic language with its own creative force; for the
modernistas used the language in which they wrote with a new sense of
birthright, speaking no longer with a Spanish accent but with the rhythms
and lilts of real Latin American speech.
Antimaterialistic sentiments were almost a determining characteris-
tic of the modernista movement. Many of its members came from the
fallen bourgeoisie to be found not only in Cuba but throughout Latin
America. The Cuban Julin del Casal belonged to a family that had been
forced o its land by large-scale competition in sugar production follow-
ing the abolition of slavery, while in Colombia Jos Asuncin Silva spent
much of his energy trying to reoat the family business that had been
ruined by civil war. The parents of the Argentinian Leopoldo Lugones
were forced to abandon their family estate because of nancial dicul-
ties and the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig saw his family lose their
wealth and inuence by the time he was twenty. Jean Franco, who com-
piled this list, comments that it would be absurd to suggest that these
men became poets because their families lost their money (indeed,
there were also wealthy dilettantes among the modernists . . .) but these
reversals almost certainly hardened that hatred of contemporary society
which is one of the constants of their writing.8 A gure like Julin del
Casal, living the life of the bohemian aesthete, collecting Chinese and
Japanese knickknacks and burning incense in front of an image of the
Buddha, is indeed the very model of deance toward material fate. And
paradigmatic modernista writings, like Rubn Daros story El rey burgus
(The bourgeois king), are allegories of the fate of the artist who rejects
bourgeois values and ends up forced to live the life of a beggar, which
expresses, among other things, the fears of material insecurity that are
never so great as among the petite bourgeoisie, especially those who are
newly poor.
The modernistas nd their antithesis in the materialism of the lm
pioneers, that new kind of image maker who now emerges like the poets
shadow, the double who represents exactly what the modernistas fear
within themselvessubmissiveness to the material interests of their class.
And all the more so in Cuba, where it seemed to the writer Jess Caste-
llanos in 1910 that materialism had become the main preoccupation
since the emancipation from Spanish rule; for, defenseless against the
 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage 65

inuence of North American commercialism, and exposed like nowhere

else in Latin America to the penetration of the new advertising and
publicity businesses, Cuba is once again the country where the reality of
Latin America is least masked.

It was not long before the early lm reached the stage where sustained
narrative became possible, and at this point new ideological tensions
appear. From the point of view of its aesthetic development, the cosmo-
politanism of early Latin American cinema, if it can be called that, was
inevitable. It was a function of the medium. Since lm was already inter-
national at the moment of its birth, because the lm trade was neces-
sarily internationalnowhere was supply equal to demand without
importing lms from abroadso nowhere in the world was lm im-
mune from the most diverse range of inuences. And because everyone
was starting from scratch, it is impossible to imagine that it could have
been otherwise. Indeed, not until the lm idiom has arrived at a greater
stage of elaboration and technical development is it possible to conceive
of such a thing as a national style in the cinema, let alone an individual
one, for that matter. The apparent exceptions, like Mlis, prove the rule.
They have been inscribed in the history of lm less as conscious artists
with their own personal style than as ciphers of supposedly inherent
possibilities within the mediumAlbert E. Smith is another example.
But the development of narrative introduces a new dimension.
In Europe, the development of lm narrative during cinemas second
decade joined with a desire to prove the respectability of the new medium
to produce the rst, and as yet far overstretched adaptations of the clas-
sics of stage and ction. In Latin America, this same desire for respectabil-
ity expressed itself in the choice of patriotic themes. Examples are the
large-scale reconstructions La batalla de Maip (The battle of Maip)
and La revolucin de mayo (The May revolution), produced by the Italian
expatriate Mario Gallo in Argentina in the centenary year of his adopted
countrys emancipation from Spain. In Cuba, Enrique Daz Quesada
found his subjects in the popular themes of more recent anticolonial
struggle. In 1913, after several more shorts, he produced his rst full-
length picture, Manuel Garca o el rey de los campos de Cuba (Manuel
Garca or the king of the Cuban countryside), based on a book by Fede-
rico Villoch concerning a bandit popularly identied with anti-Spanish
nationalism. A contemporary newspaper account of the lm suggests
 66 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

that, as one might expect, the treatment was highly melodramatic. It

ended, for example, with the bandits ghost appearing above his tomb.9
Other nationalistic themes followedsuch as, in 1914, El capitn mambi o
libertadores y guerrilleros (The mambi captain or liberators and guerrilla
ghters). Mambi was the word that identied a Cuban rebel. Derived
from the name of a black Spanish ocer who changed sides and joined
the guerrillas in Santo Domingo in 1846, Spanish soldiers sent from
Santo Domingo to Cuba in 1868 brought the term with them. Intended
pejoratively to lump the white freedom ghters with the blacks, the lib-
eration movement proudly accepted the equation.
It would seem natural to suppose that such lms represented popular
feeling against authority in a pseudorepublic of such obvious servility
toward the neocolonialists of the north. This is the way Valds Rodrguez
describes them. From his rst lm . . . to the last, wrote Valds Rodr-
guez of Daz Quesada,

the themes and characters were rmly rooted in social reality, historical
and contemporary. In some cases, such as La zafra o sangre y azcar [The
sugar harvest or blood and sugar], relations of property, social problems,
the worker and peasant struggle for human conditions of work and of
living are present in a manifest way, if rather confused, disoriented, and
without deliberation. It was the innate feeling of justice, expression of
the spirit of rebellion and equality, radically democratic, of the Cuban
people.10

The lms are now lost, but historical sense urges caution here. Valds
Rodrguez may be giving these lms the benet of the doubt, since there
were no lms anywhere at this time that were not, by later standards,
confused and disorientedeven The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance
are not completely free from these limitations of the early lm idiom.
But for the same reason, the images would have been more ideologically
ambiguousas in D. W. Griths lms too. The evidence for this is
that authority did not unequivocally condemn them as dangerous em-
bodiments of popular feeling. On the contrary. The fact is that a regime
as shaky as that of the Cuban republic had every need of the means to
legitimize itself, and lm was clearly a candidate for this job. Both El
capitn mambi and Daz Quesadas next lm, La manigua o la mujer
cubana (The countryside or the Cuban woman), were given direct as-
sistance by the government of President Mario Garca Menocal. For the
rst, the army supplied equipment and soldiers for the battle scenes; for
 The Nineteenth-Century Heritage 67

the second, Menocal, educated at North American universities, chief of

Havana police during the military occupation, then administrative head
of the Cuban American Sugar Company, and now head of a staunchly
pro-imperialist government, himself intervened to allow lming to take
place in the Morro Castle, the Spanish forticationthe oldest in Latin
Americathat overlooks Havana protecting the harbor.11 The closing
scenes of the lm, which were thus vouchsafed, represented that histor-
ical moment when the Spanish ag was lowered for the last time and
the Cuban ag was raised for the rst. Perhaps Menocal was hoping
that these images would obscure the more ambivalent memory of sim-
ilar scenes when the lowered ag was the Stars and Stripes, the day the
puppet republic he now headed was ocially born.
 CHAPTER FOUR
Melodrama and White Horses

Two Cuban investigators of early cinema in their country, Rolando Daz

Rodrguez and Lzaro Buria Prez, have divided the years 18971922 into
three periods. The rst, 18971905, is the period of cinema as simple
spectacle in as yet unequal competition with theater. The second, 1906
18, is the stage of the consolidation of cinema both as a spectacle and as
a business, but under European domination. In the third period, 1919
22, the spectacle becomes increasingly ideological in nature, the Euro-
peans are displaced by the North Americans, and the incipient national
cinema is killed o.1
Early exhibition in Latin America was substantially an activity of cmi-
cos de la legua, itinerant showmen, just like everywhere else. In most Latin
American countries, however, the geographical spread of lm was gen-
erally restricted to the reach of the railways and only a little beyond.
Along the railway lines, a regular supply of new lms from the capital
city encouraged permanent cinemas. There was a limited hinterland
where traveling showmen found places to set up in, like barns and yards,
but transport and surface communication throughout Latin America
were underdeveloped and there were vast remote areas that they never
visited at all.
In any case, rural populations in Latin America oered very little scope
for making money out of them. There is no reason to suppose that peas-
ant communities would not have been just as receptive to lms as urban
workers, only they existed beyond the cash nexus and were economi-
cally marginal. (Their labor was still largely extracted by the quasi-feudal

68
 Melodrama and White Horses 69

means inherited and evolved from the Spanish Conquest.) In this re-
spect, Cuba stood out among Latin American countries. It had an exten-
sive rural proletariat rarely found elsewhere, the workers in the ingenios,
the sugar mills attached to the large plantations in the sugar-growing
areas, which were all well served by lines of communication constructed
to get the sugar out. They were also a way for lm to come in.
In the years 1906 and 1907, at the start of the second period, cinemas
began to spread from the center of the capital to both the popular dis-
tricts and the interior of the country. Every kind of mechanism was
used to attract the audience. Stores oered customers free lm shows,
there were free gifts and car rides home (cars were also a novelty). In
these ways, and in spite of the technical and expressive limitations of
the early lm, cinema soon became the most widely distributed and
available form of commercial entertainment in Cuba. By 1920 there were
50 cinemas in Havana and more than 300 in the rest of the country. The
average number of seats in a Havana cinema was 450, with a total of
23,000 seats for a population of half a million. The total seating capacity
in the country as a whole was in the region of 130,000 to 140,000 for a
population of around four million.2 There were large areas of the coun-
try where people were out of reach of a cinema, but for the majority of
the population the evidence is clear: the market for cinema in Cuba was
not only more intensely developed than over most of Central and South
America, but penetration was roughly as intense as in many regions in
the metropolitan countries where lm had been inventednot as in-
tense as in the industrial conurbations, of course, but equal to rural dis-
tricts like, in Britain, East Anglia, or to the less developed European
countries like Greece, regions where cinemas were generally small but
quite frequently placed.
The spread of cinema in Cuba was largely due to the overall intensity
of foreign exploitation on the island and especially that of the United
States, but it was accomplished through intermediaries. The emerging
pattern of exploitation in the lm industry did not require that the dom-
inating country actually own the cinemas; it was enough for it to domi-
nate the mentality of the economically dependent tribe of creole capital-
ists. In Cuba, as in other Latin American countries, the cinemas came to
be owned by the commercial classes, the same local businesspeople who
later also set up the multitude of small commercial radio stations. Com-
mercial broadcasting spread throughout Latin America during the 1930s,
 70 Melodrama and White Horses

following the model of exploitation developed north of the Rio Grande,

and again Cuba became one of the most intensely developed Latin Amer-
ican markets. Radio depended considerably on a supply of recorded
music, for which it provided an aural shopwindow, and it grew in sym-
biosis with the record companies. This was a eld where the North
Americans supplied the technology and local producers put it to work.
In Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina, recording industries took the rich na-
tional popular music and entered it in international competition, prov-
ing that they were all good pupils. In Cuba (where Andrs Segovia made
his rst electrical record in 1927), rca was the rst to come along with a
modern electrical recording factory, and by the end of the 1930s popular
Cuban recording artists like Benny Mor and the Trio Matamoros were
known throughout Central America and the northern parts of South
America. With cinema, where the costs of production were very much
higher, local production as a result was minimal. The exhibitors were
much more dependent on the U.S. distributors than radio was on North
American record producers. And those distributors that were not them-
selves North American were still dependent on the North Americans for
a regular supply of new lms.
Yet in cinema the United States had been a late starter. Its entry into
international competition was constrained during cinemas rst twenty
years or so by the ravages of the Motion Pictures Patents War, in which
the companies battled viciously against each other to establish legal own-
ership of the industrys patents (the basis of the technological rents that
formed a signicant ingredient in prot rates). At one point, it seems
that independents needing to ee the attacks of the would-be monopo-
lists thought of Cuba as a possible scene of operations, before moving
right out of reach to California and establishing the colony that became
Hollywood. But at this time the dominant foreign lm companies in
Cuba were French. Although at home the Lumire company was pro-
gressively eclipsed by competitors, its careful preparations had given the
French a rm foreign footing, which Path and Gaumont fought it out
to turn to advantage. Cuba was one of the places where they competed.
In 1906, Havanas Teatro Actualidades, the countrys rst purpose-built
cinema, began to acquire lms from Path on a regular basis. The islands
rst lm distributors, Santos y Artiga, established in 1904, were agents
for Gaumont. Around 1909, they took over the Teatro Actualidades and
 Melodrama and White Horses 71

dropped Gaumont in favor of an exclusive contract with Path. The

arrangement was, from Paths point of view, part of the ghtback against
the growing danger from the North Americans; back in Paris, the Kodak
entrepreneur George Eastman was trying, on behalf of the Patents Com-
pany, to stymie Paths leadership in the manufacture of raw lm stock
in Europe. Gaumonts response to the North American threat was to
withdraw from international markets and consolidate at home (it sold
its British operations to British buyers during the same period). Path
was able to hold its own in Cuba and other foreign territories until the
First World War. But the war entailed a cutback in European produc-
tion, leaving a space that the North Americans, with the Patents War
now behind them, were eager to ll.
Film, a new invention, became a major branch of what the Frankfurt
sociologists in the 1930s, Theodor Adorno and the others, identied as
the culture industry, a segment of production nanced by entertainment
capital. This industry is characteristically imperialist; entertainment cap-
ital is dominated by North American interests and closely linked with
the electrical industry, which for Lenin, in his 1917 pamphlet Imperial-
ism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was the very model of capitalism
in its highest stage of development. Even at the beginning, when the
technology was still primitive and the expressive means still poor, the
infant lm business in each country was only able to satisfy demand
with diculty, and through the international character that its trading
patterns even then revealed, cinema showed itself a child of late capital-
ism, just like the giant electric companies with their transnational struc-
ture that Lenin described. So explosively did lm catch on that rates of
growth were unprecedented, and for several years no country was able
to produce enough for its own home market. If the colonizers of Holly-
wood were able to turn these conditions to their special advantage, this
is because they were the rst to obtain the backing of nance capital.
The process upon which the North American lm business then entered
altered the prospects of creole capital more rapidly and radically than it
aected the big European lm companies. These had been seriously
weakened by the war but they still had an industrial base and national
roots. In the countries of the imperialized periphery, such advantages
were entirely absent, and the local operators either left the business or
rapidly gravitated into exhibition. Distribution concentrated on a small
 72 Melodrama and White Horses

number of companies, principally North American subsidiaries. Pro-

duction was left to a few adventurists.

Jos Agustn Mahieu has characterized the rst period of cinema in his
own country, Argentina, as one of empirical adventurism.3 The term
could equally well be used for Cuba. In Argentina, this period lasted
about fteen years and its end was signaled, says Mahieu, in 1912, with
the founding of the Sociedad General Cinematogrca, the rst lm
dealers in the country to move from selling lms to exhibitors to rental
instead. In Cuba this transition had been reached ve or six years earlier,
with the company of Hornedo y Salas.
This changeover lays the basis for subsequent market domination by
the North American distributors. They became the majors because they
had understood that control of distribution was the dominant position
in the industry. As the economic historian of cinema Peter Bachlin has
explained:

The distributor takes over the risks of purchasing the lms while the
exhibitor only has to rent them; the distributors mediation improves
economic conditions for the exhibitor by allowing a more rapid change
of programs. For the producers, this development signals a growth in the
market, with lms able to reach consumers more rapidly and in greater
number, while also constituting a kind sales guarantee for their lms. In
general, the distributor buys the prints of one or more lms from one or
more producers and rents them to numerous exhibitors; in the process,
he is able to extract a sum considerably greater than his costs.4

The balance of power thus shifts to the distributor. But since cinemas
in the capitalist system exist to provide not lms for audiences, but audi-
ences for lms, so exhibitors in turn serve as fodder for the distributors,
and the producers behind them.
The 1920s, in the North American lm industry, became the period
in which dealers-turned-distributors learned the tricks of the trade and
battled for control of the exhibition market with the emerging Holly-
wood studios, which were trying to extend their own control over the
industry. It was the period when the peculiarities of the lm as a com-
modity rst clearly emerged. The lm is consumed in situ, not through
the physical exchange of the object but by an act of symbolic exchange,
the exchange of its projected impression. William Marston Seabury, a
North American lm lawyer, explained that in the picture industry the
 Melodrama and White Horses 73

public may be regarded as the ultimate consumer but in reality the public
consumes nothing. It pays an admission price at a theatre from which it
takes away nothing but a mental impression of whatever it has been
permitted to see.5 Correspondingly, the exchange value of the lm is
realized not through physical exchange of the object itself, but through
gate money, the price of admission, in this way manifesting its anity
with various other forms of cultural production and entertainment. But
if it doesnt need to pass physically into the hands of the consumer, nei-
ther does the lm need to pass into the legal ownership of the exhibitor.
He need only rent it.
By this means, the exhibitor becomes the prey of the ways the distrib-
utors nd to manipulate the conditions of rentalblock booking
and blind booking, for example, in which they force exhibitors to take
pictures they dont want and sometimes havent seen in order to get the
ones they do want. Nonetheless, Seabury insists that lm is entirely dier-
ent from the commercial operation of the chain stores with which people
had begun to compare the cinema. Bachlin is in agreement with this.
It is, he says, of great importance for the forms of concentration and
monopoly that arise within the industry. The principles of price-xing
and ways of dominating the market will be dierent from those that re-
late to products that involve only a single act of purchase by the con-
sumer, that is to say, products that disappear from the market in one
transaction.6 In Europe, the North American distributors found resis-
tance to their various malpractices, and during the 1920s European
countries progressively erected legal barriers to protect their own lm
industries, with varying degrees of success. They were barriers of which
it was practically impossible to conceive in underdeveloped countries.
Even had governments had the will, what should they try to protect?
The only Latin American country that in those days ever tried it was
revolutionary Mexico, in the early 1920s, angry at the oensive repre-
sentation of their country that Mexicans began to nd in the Holly-
wood picture. As for Cuba,

The taste of the Cuban public is rapidly becoming more educatedthe

highly sensational lm has had its day and interest now centres on the
drama with what is called a strong love interest. The public is now
accustomed to the very best type of lm, indeed to a better type than
in England. Comic lms are not popular and even Charles Chaplin,
who combines comedy with genius, is not as popular as previously.
 74 Melodrama and White Horses

The action must be quick and the ending happy. Italian lms have
lost ground in Cuba owing to alleged slowness of action, while as an
illustration of the need for a happy ending can be mentioned the Prisoner
of Zenda, a rst class lm which indeed became a great success but which
was shown with some trepidation and caused some criticism by its
renunciation scene in the nal act.
The market in Cuba is known as a star market, i.e. producers names
are rarely if ever known and advertising follows the same lines, calling
the lm a Mary Pickford lm, or a Douglas Fairbanks lm. These
names are so well known to the public that it is quite sucient to
advertise the name of the star in order to ll the theatre.7

Just because these are the quaint observations of His Britannic Majestys
consul-general in Havana is no reason to discount this report on the
taste of Cuban audiences in 1923. The consul-generals comments are
concise and very much to the point:

The proximity of the United States is almost fatal to the lms of other
countries. Not only are all the American lm stars well known to the
Cuban public, but both the Spanish and American papers in Havana
constantly grant publicity and a number of American cinema magazines
are in circulation in Cuba. Advertising is intense. Theatre owners and
others have only to run over to Florida (some 96 miles) or even up to
New York (60 hours) to see the latest lms and purchase them on the
spot, and most of them have agents and correspondents in the United
States who send particulars of all new lms and report on their
suitability for the Cuban market. (Ibid.)

In fact, the U.S. majors began to move in on Cuba while the First
World War was in progress: Paramount was rst, in 1917. By 1926, Cuba
represented 1.25 percent of U.S. foreign distribution, according to the
tables published in the Film Year Book. It is not much in comparison
with Europe, where Britain commanded a huge 40 percent and Germany
came a distant second with 10 percent, although several European mar-
kets were much smaller than Cuba: Switzerland, Holland, Czechoslova-
kia, and Poland were only 1 percent each, while Yugoslavia, Rumania,
Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece represented 1 percent between them. In
Latin America, Brazil had 2.5 percent, Mexico 2 percent, Panama and
Central America 0.75 percent, and Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile,
Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador 6 percent between them.8 None of this made
it easier for Cuban producers. The director of a lm made in 1925, Entre
dos amores (Between two loves), commented that if the lm failed com-
 Melodrama and White Horses 75

mercially while the public had applauded it, this was because of the for-
eign distribution companies, which were anxious to prevent the develop-
ment of Cuban lm production.9 Foreign is a euphemism for North
American.
How did the distributors achieve this kind of market dominance,
from which they could dictate their will? They engaged not only in the
malpractices already mentioned. Seabury quotes the comments of an
independent exhibitor in the United States about the variants of the
rental system who complains that they are designed to provide the dis-
tributor with a guarantee plus a percentage, which makes the percent-
age excess prot. But the bigger such excess prots, the more investment
one can attract. The industry leaders knew this perfectly well. According
to one spokesman, discussing before an audience at the Harvard Busi-
ness School in 1926 the question of how we are trying to lessen sales re-
sistance in those countries that want to build up their own industries:
We are trying to do that by internationalising this art, by drawing on
old countries for the best talent that they possess in the way of artists,
directors and technicians, and bringing these people over to our country,
by drawing on their literary talents, taking their choicest stories and pro-
ducing them in our own way, and sending them back into the countries
where they are famous. In doing that, however, we must always keep in
mind the revenue end of it. Out of every dollar received, about 75 still
comes out of America and only 25 out of all the foreign countries
combined. Therefore you must have in mind a picture that will rst
bring in that very necessary 75 and that secondly will please the other
25% that you want to please. If you please the 25% of foreigners to the
detriment of your home market, you can see what happens. Of course,
the prot is in that last 25%.10
Or rather, the excess, or surplus, prot. This is cardinal, because it is
not ordinary but surplus prot that attracts investment capital, and this
is ultimately how Hollywood came to dominate world cinema. Holly-
wood gleaned a surplus prot from the market that gave it the backing
of Wall Street, which was already fast becoming the most substantial
and modern fund of investment capital in the world.
In the 1920s, the North American lm industry underwent a rapid
process of vertical integration, in which not only did the production
studios and the distributors combine, but they began to acquire their
own cinemas. This was intended to combat the formation of circuits
among independent exhibitors, where booking arrangements were pooled
 76 Melodrama and White Horses

in retaliation against the methods of the renters. But abroad in Latin

America, the distributors faced no such organized resistance, since the
exhibitors had neither the capital resources nor the bargaining power to
ght, and there the distributors had no need to acquire cinemas to break
the exhibitors backs and bully them into submission. They acquired
no more than a handful in each country, simply to serve as showcases.
When foreign-owned cinemas were taken over in the Cuban national-
izations on the weekend of October 14, 1960, there were no more than
eleven of them.

The lm as a commodity has another peculiarity, which has been ob-

served by the North American economist Thomas Guback. He points
out that the cost of making prints for distribution is an extremely small
fraction of the total costs of production, what the industry call the neg-
ative coststhe costs of getting to the nished negative of the complete
lm from which the prints are made. (The prints then become part of
the distribution costs.) Indeed, this proportion has grown progressively
smaller over the course of the history of cinema, as production budgets
have grown larger and larger. It means, above all, that lms can be ex-
ported without having to divert the product away from the home market
(whereas with many commodities, especially in underdeveloped coun-
tries, the home market must be deprived in order to be able to export).
In Gubacks words, The cost of an extra copy is the price of the raw
stock, duplicating and processingincremental costs . . . a motion pic-
ture is a commodity one can duplicate indenitely without substantially
adding to the cost of the rst unit produced . . . a given lm tends to be an
innitely exportable commodity; prints exported do not aect domes-
tic supplies nor the revenue resulting from domestic exhibition. . . . We
can have our lm and foreigners can have it too.11
When you add that the United States soon developed into the largest
internal lm market in the world at the time, it is clear why it was ir-
resistible. Because it was so big, U.S. producers were able to recover nega-
tive costs on the home market alone, and the distributors were therefore
able to supply the foreign market at discount prices that undercut for-
eign producers in their own territories. They also undercut European
competitors. The consul-generals 1923 report commented that British
prices are said to be too high.
 Melodrama and White Horses 77

However, Gubacks empiricism is misleading about the shape of Holly-

woods foreign policy when he suggests that the overseas oensive of
the U.S. lm industry dates only from after the Second World War, when
the contraction of the cinema audience following the introduction of
television made foreign revenue increasingly necessary for protability.
He is correct when he claims that before that, American lms were sold
abroad but the resulting revenue hardly compared to what the domestic
market yieldedthis is true, it was around 25 percentbut misses
the point when he continues that Foreign revenue was simply an addi-
tional increment, extra prots upon which the American lm com-
panies did not depend. It was indeed a surplus prot and therefore
important in attracting investment capital. This gap in his thinking
leads to his misleading conclusion that the foreign market did not war-
rant enough attention to force Hollywood to modify signicantly the
content of its lms to suit tastes abroad, nor to induce the lm companies
to maintain elaborate overseas organizations.12 They didnt do this be-
cause they didnt have totheir methods were the same as those extolled
by the Washington Post at the beginning of the century in the newspapers
declaration about wanting the overseas territories of the defeated Span-
ish because they will one day become purchasers at our bargain base-
ments. What Hollywood discovered was that in the cinema, cultural
imperialism works just as well as colonialism but at less expense.
Hollywood was never entirely without international competition, how-
ever. The 1923 British consul-generals report, for instance, said that after
North American pictures, the order of popularity from various countries
went: Italy, Germany, France, Spain. (The British lm is unknown. . . .
The fault lies with the British producer who has never attempted to
work the market, and now there is a grave doubt whether it is worth-
while to do so.) At the end of the Second World War, things looked
rather dierent. The main competition facing Hollywood on Cuban
screens came from Mexico, and to a lesser extent Argentina.
The success of Mexican pictures in Cuba is an ambivalent phenome-
non, since Mexican cinema largely consisted in the adaptation of Holly-
wood genres, and thereby testies to the ideological as well as the eco-
nomic eects of Hollywood domination. A U.S. government market
report from 1947 informs us about the lms Cuban audiences were then
watching:
 78 Melodrama and White Horses

Film distributors and theatre owners say that Mexican movies are more
popular in Cuba outside the two large cities of Havana and Santiago
than the productions of any other country except fast-paced action lms
with a readily understood plot from the United States. Action lms of
this type are the only United States movies which ordinarily outrank
Mexican lms in popularity in theatres in cities and towns of less than
50,000 population. The preference for action pictures from Hollywood
is measurably greater if their locale, stars, and supporting casts can be
easily identied by patrons, as the titles suggest. An action picture in an
unfamiliar setting is not as popular as a Mexican movie which does not
have wave after wave of turbulent activity. . . . More than a dozen distrib-
utors, including branches of United States studios, unanimously agree
that Mexican movies hold a unique, high place in the aections of the
representative Cuban theatregoer. . . . Hearing Spanish instead of having
to read or being unable to read Spanish subtitles of English language
movies is an important but not the fundamental reason for the partiality
shown Mexican movies. . . . Artistically and technically Mexican movies
are not comparable with United States and European pictures. However,
Mexican movies have been able to portray the national spirit, institutions,
character, and social organism of Mexico, which to a large degree are simi-
lar to those in Cuba. Nearly all of the dozen or so Cuban features made
to date were produced with the help of Mexican directors and stars.13

Or as a later commentator put it, By the 1920s, the hits produced and
exported by Hollywood exerted a growing inuence and even sharper
competition. The Mexican lm-makers fell under the cultural sway of
their northern neighbor and, to the degree that they did, their lmic
concern with national reality diminished14 a generalization that, he
adds, is by no means unique to Mexico.
The aesthetics of the adaptation of Hollywood values to Latin Amer-
ican cinema was analyzed by the Cuban cineasts Enrique Colina and
Daniel Daz Torres, in an essay in Cine Cubano in the mid-1970s titled
Ideology of Melodrama in the Old Latin American Cinema:

During the silent period . . . Hollywood fabricated and disseminated the

myth of the American Dream by making the image of reality presented
in its lms conform to reections of a falsely optimistic and promising
universe. Skin-deep features of dierent cultures were tted into novel-
ettish stories that created a stereotypical image, exotic and picturesque,
of the underdeveloped countries. This image showed a subworld
dominated by the instincts, by a tendency toward irresponsibility and
licentiousness, enveloped in a stereotyped mythical atmosphere. The
primitive was counterposed to the aseptic order of civilization, and thus
 Melodrama and White Horses 79

the screen mediated the frustrated desires of a bourgeois universe that

demanded conformity and equilibrium. This discriminatory content,
oered to popular consumption, opened the oodgates to a manifold
process of cultural colonization that would end up resonating through-
out the various national cinemas of the hemisphere.15

Colina and Daz Torres proceed to pinpoint the leading characteristics

of the Latin American lm melodrama to be found in the paradigms of
the Argentine and Mexican lm industries in the 1930s and 1940s. Melo-
drama is taken broadly, since the cinema of these two countries, to-
gether with that of Brazil, which the language barrier kept out of Cuba,
created a number of distinctive genres of their own. Their variety, how-
ever, amounted to little more than dierent ways of treating the same
basic set of conventions. The Mexican critic Jorge Ayala Blanco, who
has analyzed the genres of Mexican cinema in great detail, has observed
that a number of the genres thrown up in the 1930s were hybrid and
articial, and their apparent consolidation in the 1940s, in swashbuckling
adventures, historical biographies, adaptations of novels of the kind
that used to be serialized in the nineteenth-century newspapers, all had
no other function than to substitute hurriedly for Hollywood product
during the Second World War, when Hollywood was much given over
to wartime propaganda that had little to do with the Mexican audience.
There were other genres, however, that deserve more attention, because
they elicited a more rmly based popular response: they answered to a
truly national need and can be considered as a collective expression,
albeit secondhand.16 These include the comedies of ranch life and the
epics of small-town communities; the almost folkloric narratives of the
Mexican Revolution and its revolutionary heroes; various lms of fam-
ily life; above all those lms that nostalgically idealized the Porrian
hacienda, the semifeudal relations and paternalistic benevolence of the
Mexican ranch in the years of the prerevolutionary dictator Porrio Daz.
There was obviously more melodrama, so to speak, in some of these
genres than in others, but if they elicited a popular response it was be-
cause, like the classic Victorian melodrama that dominated the London
stage for much of the nineteenth century, they were just about the only
dramatic forms available to the audience to deal at all with the dreams
and needs of the popular classes. Inevitably, they were clumsy and emo-
tionally oversimplied, and again like Victorian melodrama, thoroughly
moralistic. Like the Hollywood paradigms it followed, the Mexican lm
 80 Melodrama and White Horses

melodrama was an art that proclaimed the predominance of the indi-

vidual over the milieu, at the same time as it subordinated the individual
to the given order. It diluted awareness of social problems by installing a
Catholic-inspired spiritual realm in parallel to the social order. It re-
duced life to a single dimension, that of love and the sentimental life;
it belittled social equality by alleging that human beings were all equal
before the designs of the heart. But how did the heart behave? Entrenched
in a world that was instinctively defensive and defensive about instincts,
the dominant characteristic of this artless art was sentimentality, which,
to give it a more precise meaning, is the disguised return of repressed
feeling through the obsessive exaggeration of ordinary sentiment.
Sometimes all this took the form of the costume picture, in which
case, as the Cuban writers explain, the spectator was presented with a
cast of supposedly popular characters who had been reduced to carica-
ture and given a dose of paternalistic moral chauvinism. Return to the
primitive past was seen as a journey to the fountain of authenticity, and
the blemishes of underdevelopment were celebrated as old popular
values. True popular values were nowhere to be seen. The idea of the
nation itself became completely general and empty, an ahistorical arche-
type that was detached from the evolution of society and real social
conditions. God, Fatherland, and Home composed the inseparable triad
that social equilibrium demanded and depended on.
Since morality in such a system is no more than a badge, its presence
or absence can be read on the faces and in the bodies of the actors, in
the iconography of villains, suering mothers, prodigal sons, innocent
girls, and women of the streets. Typecasting was taken to its extreme in
the Latin American lm melodrama. Sara Garcas long-suering face
made her the mother incarnate; Mara Flix and Tita Morello embodied
the enigma and diabolical attraction of the female sinner, their deep
voices and caressing manner the expressions of shameful amours (which
never needed actually to be seeneverything was achieved by sugges-
tion and innuendo); Carlos Lpez Moctezumas grim looks and disagree-
able features spelled out his villainy. Cinema has alwaysperhaps by
necessitysought its primary iconography in the physiognomy of the
actors. The actor in cinema, instead of having to project, is projected (as
Stanley Cavell, the North American philosopher, has felicitously put it).
This is why the nonprofessional actor, when appropriately cast, makes
such important contributions to lm art. But it also explains how and
 Melodrama and White Horses 81

why the genres of Hollywood cinema were constructed to make the star
systemas vehicles for the character types that the stars variously em-
bodied. (In the process, the stars were turned into valuable pieces of
property, which the studios bought and sold and rented among them-
selves.) The system was sophisticated enough in Hollywood and other
more artistically developed cinemas to make it possible to treat lms as
vehicles for the stars as well as vice versa. In the imitation of the star
system that developed in Latin America, however, the personality of the
actor was sacriced to the abstractions of the genre. The resultto re-
turn to the Cubans analysiswas that relationships between the char-
acters on the screen reduced reality to a series of articial cause-and-
eect mechanisms.
The entire semiotic system of the Latin American lm melodrama is
based on this. In such a world, the anecdote becomes the principal nar-
rative form, with an oversimplied structure that makes the linearity of
the average Hollywood picture into a veritable labyrinth. It typically
consists of variants of no more than two or three continually repeated
themes, many fewer than the basic plots available in Hollywood cinema.
Whenever the lm is set in the past, history remains quite alien, merely
ornamental, and, of course, idealized. Past or present, the lm stands
outside real historical time; it is the product of a dichotomy between
social and aective life. The mechanisms of cause and eect, the ex-
pression of reductive one-dimensional ethics, give a narrative form that
is only apparently dynamic.
There can be no real audience identication with the complexities of
character and behavior, no exploration by the lm viewer of the ambi-
guities of intention, since there are no complexities and ambiguities in
this universe except by unintended accident. (Jean Renoir once said that
technique is a way of doing again deliberately what one rst did by acci-
dent. But this implies a strong and highly structured artistic tradition in
which ambiguity and accident are cultivated and encouraged; here it
merely signies lack of control over the medium or awareness of the
complexities it can be made to yield.) Consequently, the argument of
these lms proceeds by a succession of climaxes that are really like es-
cape valves that need to be decongested of accumulated emotion in order
that in the end equilibrium can be restored. The imagery comes from
Colina and Daz Torres: In this persistent correction of the level of
dramatic tension, they explain, and in the way the unusual is made to
 82 Melodrama and White Horses

appear banal, this cinema nds its regulatory mechanisms, which pre-
vent anything sudden revealing the undercurrent contained by their
hypocritical conventions. Dramatic developmentthis will hardly
come as a surpriseis essentially verbal, and the organization of visual
elements is subordinate to the primacy of the verbal text:

This kind of hierarchy can be explained by the fact that the suggestive
value of images provokes interpretation that would go beyond the
unambiguous signications of this type of lmic schema. However,
a lack of aesthetic expression in the visual components of these lms
prevents any transcendence of the immediate, merely functional signi-
cance of locations, decor, dress, makeup, props, and so forth, which are
used to rearm the dramatic conventions carried by the formalized
gestures and standardized message.17

With the coming of sound also came a development that, were Guback
right, would be rather strange: Hollywood began making lms in Span-
ish. The rst was actually an independent production by a successful
Cuban actor, Ren Cardona, with the title Sombras habaeras (Shadows
of Havana). But then the big Hollywood companies got involved and
spent two or three years making Spanish-language versions of regular
Hollywood movies. They were not dubbedthat was beyond the tech-
nical means the talkies started with. They were remakes in Spanish, with
Spanish-speaking actors and a Spanish-speaking director, but otherwise
exactly the same. The Big House, directed by George Hill in 1930 with
Wallace Beery and John Gilbert, became El presidio, with Juan de Landa
and Tito Davison; Tod Brownings 1931 Dracula with Bela Lugosi was re-
made under the same title with Carlos Villaras and Lupita Tovar; and
there were many others.18 They just went in and took over the sets and
the shooting script and did exactly the same thing, but in Spanish.
These lms did not make money directly. They were essentially a sales
device for selling the talkies, for goading Latin American exhibitors to
convert to sound. The talkies represented a major investment by the
U.S. lm industry, the product of an intricate history of competition
between the studios, which was undertaken in the face of the threat of
falling audiences. It was an investment that Hollywood needed to recoup
as fast as possible. It was essential that exhibitors abroad were rapidly
induced to spend the money necessary to convert their cinemas, other-
wise the 25 percent surplus prot from the foreign market would begin
to drain away. In the case of Britain, William Fox was smart enough to
 Melodrama and White Horses 83

persuade the Gaumont circuit into it by arranging for 80 million for

the purpose to be subscribed by banks in the city of London. A very
large part of that was the purchase of equipment from the United States.
This kind of nance was much more dicult to achieve in Latin Amer-
ica, but the fact that here too the cinemas were owned by local capital
though there were very few signicant circuitsserved the exporters
purposes. Making Spanish-language lms and putting them into their
showcases served to bully the local cinema owners to nd the means or
risk going under. They made these lms for this purpose as a loss leader,
and it ceased as soon as the techniques of rerecording were brought to
the point, in the mid-1930s, that allowed the original production to be
dubbed into any foreign language required.
One of the directors recruited to Hollywood, by Twentieth-Century
Fox, to direct (supervise would be a better word) these Spanish-language
versions was the Cuban Ramn Pen. Pens career is an excellent illus-
tration of the fate of Cuban cinema from before the talkies to the 1950s,
and not only because his name crops up in connection with almost all
the attempts that were made to create a basis for regular production in
Cuba. Pen and the others he was involved with were optimistic oppor-
tunists. Arturo Agramonte, summing up Cuban production in the inter-
war years, says that it gave the impression of photographed theater:
weak themes and decient shooting gave the viewer the sensation that
something was lacking. In fact this was due to an almost total want of
close-ups, as well as an insucient variety of angles, which made the
lms monotonous. It was a rude shock for the technicians and for seri-
ous investors, for whom all opportunities were closed o. This situation
left the door open rather more to adventurers, who were less well inten-
tioned than the traditional white horse [caballo blanco].19 What in
Latin America is called a white horse is what is called in English an
angel, a theatrical backer. In Cuba, says Agramonte, they did not usually
put money into lms. Pen, however, managed to persuade one or two
of them to do so, thus becoming the nearest thing to a professional lm
director in Cuba at the time. The French lm historian Georges Sadoul
praises his La virgen de la caridad (The Virgin of Charity, 1930), one of the
last Cuban silent pictures, as almost neorealist, but this is being generous.
Pen was an energetic operator. He was associated with most of the
attempts to set Cuban lm production on a regular basis between 1920
and 1939. None of these businesses lasted very long. Agramonte says
 84 Melodrama and White Horses

that apart from lack of condence on the part of always cautious Cuban
investors, the failure to establish sustained production was due above all
to a total lack of support from the banks. In these conditions, the back-
ing of caballos blancos was essential. Pen began his career with a trip to
the United States in 1920 with the money of a stable full of them in his
pocket, to purchase several thousand dollars worth of equipment. It
was duly installed in new studios belonging to a company calling itself
Estudios Golden Sun Pictures, whose rst production he then directed
himself. He managed to make six more lms over the next ve years be-
fore embarking on a new collaboration in 1926 with a certain Richard
Harlan, who later worked in Hollywood with Cecil B. DeMille. This was
the Pan American Pictures Corporation, a grand name for a shoestring
operation. Its short run of productions were mostly directed by either
Harlan or Pen. Absolutely typical was Pens Casi varn (Almost mas-
culine) of 1926. It is hard to imagine a more inconsequential but thor-
oughly sexist absurdity: an adventuress is obligated to a villain who
proposes to rob a rich mansion. She disguises herself as a chaueur and
goes along to teach the seorito of the house to drive. The deceit is dis-
covered, of course, and once restored to womanhood, she is forgiven by
the young gallant, and all live happily ever after.
It was in Hollywood that Pen really learned his trade, churning out
the remakes. They provided a certain training, especially in speed, and
when Hollywood no longer had any work to oer him, Pen went and
put this training to use in Mexico, where production values were so
constrained that every lm had to be a quickie. A little legend grew up
around Pen that his greatest achievement was to complete ten lms
in 126 days of continuous production.20 This is doubtless an exaggera-
tion, but Garca Riera conrms that he did indeed make more lms
than any other director working in Mexico at the time. He was the
champion, says Garca Riera, of the melodrama.21 The methods that
were used to keep the costs of shooting down have been described by
another director of Mexican quickiesthey were not much dierent
from the methods employed on similar productions in Britain in the
same period: In the rst place, I reduced the use of the clapper to a
minimum. Second, I didnt bother with framing up, which seemed to
me unnecessary . . . I lmed like this: a wide shot with one camera, and
when I called cut I only stopped the main camera and left the lights
burning; then I approached the actors with a handheld camera and took
 Melodrama and White Horses 85

close-ups. In the third place, I never repeated a scene. If an actor made a

mistake it didnt worry me. I changed the position of the camera and
went on lming from the point where the mistake had been made.22 It
is not dicult to imagine the outcome. The clapper is used to mark the
point of synchronization between picture and sound trackwithout
the clapper, synchronization can be imperfect; not bothering to frame
up but only pointing the camera in the right direction with an appro-
priate lens annihilates composition and gives the picture a sloppy look;
as for handheld close-ups and only changing angles when there is a mis-
take, this is to discard the entire artistry of decoupage, the articulation of
visual rhythm and dramatic ow. The advantage of Pens Hollywood
experience was that he could do all these things a bit more eciently
than others. He had a good line in potboilers, ranging from swashbuck-
ling adventures set in the time of the viceroyalty, to lms like Tierra,
amor y dolor (Earth, love, and distress, 1934) and El bastardo (The bas-
tard, 1937), both of them vehicles for artistic nudityJorge Ayala
Blancos nicely ironic term for one of the subgenres of 1930s Mexican
cinema.23 On the other hand, it would be unfair to deny that Pen had
his pretensions: in 1933, he directed Tiburn, an adaptation of Ben Jon-
sons Volpone, the rst such enterprise in the Mexican cinema. Garca
Riera says of it that in this Volpone transformed into a modern and
mundane tragicomedy, Pens timid formalist intents are shipwrecked
on the verbose dialogue elaborated by a Bustillo Oro in the desire to
demonstrate his culture, in homage to a cast composed of true cham-
pions of overacting.24
After returning to Cuba at the end of the 1930s, Pen again attempted
to create a production base in Havana and succeeded in bringing to-
gether another group of backers. The resulting company, Pecusa (Pel-
culas Cubanas S.A.) installed itself in new studios in 1938, and managed
to make six lms before giving up the ghost before the following year
was out. Some of these lmsthough none of the ones directed by
Penwere musical comedies, and these represent perhaps the most
distinctive (but not distinguished) product of the struggling Cuban cin-
ema of the pseudo-republic. This type of lm was hardly unique to
Cuba, of course. On the contrary, the coming of sound gave Latin Amer-
ican producers the opportunity to enlist local popular music, and em-
ploy musical artistes with a commercial track record already proven by
radio and records. The answer Hollywood found to this competition
 86 Melodrama and White Horses

was what the audience in the Harvard Business School had already
learned in 1926: they poached the talent and the music. They already
had Fred Astaire Flying Down to Rio to meet Dolores del Rio (real
name: Lolita Dolores de Martnez, and not Brazilian but Mexican) in
1933. As for Pecusa, Valds Rodrguez explained that the reason for its
collapse was undoubtedly its lms, as much for their content as their
form . . . Pecusa had been the foremost exponent of the mistakes and
lack of bearings of Cuban cinema . . . [their lms were] a transplant onto
the screen of the Cuban bufo theater in its later years at a time when it
was already a lesser genre, which represented the vernacular theater at its
least worthy.25
In the 1940s and 1950s, Cuban production eorts were dominated by
the Mexican lm industry in the form of coproductions using Mexican
directors and stars. Occasionally, there were similar eorts with Argen-
tina. At the beginning of 1952, however, just before Batistas coup, the
government of Carlos Pro set up a lm nance bank and executive
commission for the lm industry (Patronato para el Fomento de la In-
dustria Cinematogrca). According to a report in the U.S. trade jour-
nal Variety, this commission was authorized to advance producers up to
33 percent of the costs of production: this provision, in eect, under-
writes up to 33% of losses should that picture lay an egg since repay-
ment shall only be from its earnings.26 It added that the commission
was to be nanced by a national lottery (not inappropriately, one might
say). Such arrangements could make no essential dierence to the state
of lm production in Cuba. The most distinguished lms made in Cuba
in the years before the Revolution were North American productions
on location, including one Errol Flynn movie, one Victor Mature lm,
and The Old Man and the Sea, directed to begin with by Fred Zinneman,
who was replaced by Henry King, who in turn was replaced by John
Sturges.
Only one other Cuban lm of this period calls for special comment:
La rosa blanca (The white rose), subtitled Momentos de la vida de Mart
(Moments from the life of Mart). A coproduction with Mexico, it was a
government-sponsored ocial tribute to the Cuban national hero, who
was played by the Mexican actor Roberto Canedo under the direction
of one of Mexicos leading directors, El Indio Fernndez. Canedo bore
not the slightest resemblance to Mart, physically or spiritually. The
commission charged with supervising the production, which succeeded
 Melodrama and White Horses 87

only in oending national dignity with its sentimentalizing, was com-

posed of right-wing intellectuals such as Francisco Ichazo, the man who
warned Julio Garca Espinosa a few years later about U.S. embassy con-
cern over the clandestine El Megano.

In 1958, an article appeared in the Havana journal Carteles titled The

Possibilities of a Film Industry in Cuba: Considerations.27 The central
question the article raised was, Is the home market sucient to sustain
a lm industry? The author, one scar Pino Santos, began his answer
by pointing out that the average Cuban expenditure at the cinema over
the years 194857 was 0.7 percent of the national income, as against 0.5
percent in the United States. (His gures dier from those covering the
same period given in 1960 by Francisco Mota, from which an even higher
average expenditure of 0.9 percent can be derived.)28 There were fteen
people for every cinema seat in Cuba, which had no lm production of
its own to speak of, whereas in Mexico and Brazil, with substantial in-
dustries producing, in their best years, as many as a hundred features a
year, there were eighteen and twenty-ve, respectively. The fact was, said
Pino Santos, the Cuban market simply wasnt big enough, even if they
did spend more on cinema than in the mecca in the north. The total
average income for a lm exhibited in Cuba he estimated at some 26,000
pesos. Out of this sum, for a Cuban lm, about 15,600 pesos went to the
distributor, about 6,300 to the producer, the remaining 4,100 to the ex-
hibitor. Was it possible to make lms on this little money? No way.
Again, the gures Mota gives are a bit dierent, though he is talking
about imported lms, for which, he reported, the royalty was said to be
40 percent, although only half this sum actually left the country after
various deductions. (In 1954, Variety reported that a new tax threatened
the U.S. lm industry in Cuba, a 20 percent levy on top of the existing
3 percent it had previously always managed to avoid. The article men-
tioned that Cuba rated as a $3-million market for the U.S. companies.)29
Pino Santoss gures gave the exhibitors share as 16 percent; Mota esti-
mated 20 percent to the exhibitors. But even this dierence is not mate-
rial. The point is that unless a very much higher sumdouble or even
morehad gone back to the producer, not even a cheaply made lm
could recoup its cost. Even the 33 percent that the commission established
by Pro eectively granted against losses was insucient. It could only
really serve as a subsidy to attract foreign, mainly Mexican, coproduction.
 88 Melodrama and White Horses

What chances, then, for icaic? What cheek the Cuban revolutionaries
had, if they thought they could really create a lm industry that would
not need constant and enormous subsidy! Could an underdeveloped
country aord such luxuries? The answer is that this line of reasoning
only applies under capitalist conditions, in which the middlemen (the
distributors) and the retailers (the exhibitors) rake o the prots before
anything gets back to the producer. The provisions that are made in the
decree by which icaic was set up envision and empower it to intervene
not only as a production house but also as both a distributor and an ex-
hibitor, in order to alter these conditions, knowing that unless indeed
they were altered, lms produced in Cuba would never stand a chance.
Of course, icaic has needed subsidy, but not because Cuban lms
have not taken enough at the box oce. They have often done so, some-
times very rapidly. The problem is foreign exchange. The exclusion
of Cuban lms from many parts of the foreign market has prevented
them earning enough freely exchangeable currency entirely to cover the
inevitable foreign costs of the enterprise. These foreign costs are of two
main kinds: rst, the costs of purchasing lms for distribution; and sec-
ond, in order to make their own, the costs of the industrys most monop-
olized resource, lm stock (of which there are no more than half a
dozen manufacturing companies in the world). Foreign-exchange needs
were reduced by trade agreements with communist-bloc countries, which
supplied up to 40 percent of the new lms distributed annually, and by
the expedient of purchasing lm stock for distribution copies of icaics
own lms from East Germany. Even then, Cuba had to make do with no
more than six or eight copies for the entire country, with the result that
programming was carried out centrally, and copies had to be kept in
circulation even after becoming scratched or damaged. icaic would
prefer to shoot on Eastmancolor, which the U.S. blockade makes it di-
cult or expensive for it to obtain, and instead therefore often shoots on
Fuji, but this is Japanese and still requires foreign exchange.
For much of its existence, icaic has been nanced according to the
system of central planning practiced by communism in power. Here
protability plays no direct role in the evaluation of the enterprise, which
instead receives a prearranged sum from the state budget; any net income
goes back to the treasury from which centrally budgeted funds are allo-
cated. The system allowed social and political considerations to take
precedence over market mechanisms, but could also lead to unrealistic
 Melodrama and White Horses 89

economic judgments. In the Cuba of the 1990s, after the collapse of the
communist bloc, it would become unsustainable. Before then, icaics
annual production budget stood at seven million pesos. In other words,
its entire production program, which averaged out at around three or
four feature-length movies a year (six or eight in the 1980s), more than
forty documentaries, a dozen or so cartoons, and the weekly newsreel
all this has been accomplished on less than the cost of a single big-budget
movie in Hollywood. Indeed, the comparison grows ever more striking
as Hollywood budgets steadily increase, which they do not only because
of ination in the currency but also because of inated production values.
In theory, as a state enterprise, icaic enjoyed the position of a verti-
cally integrated monopoly, comprising production, distribution, and
exhibition. In practice, its exhibition wing would consist only of the
Cinemateca and a small circuit of rst-run houses. After the instigation
in the 1970s of the system of local government known as Popular Power,
the cinemas were owned and run by the local administration also charged
with running such facilities as shops and petrol stations. Box-oce
earnings pay for daily running costs and renting lms from icaics dis-
tribution wing. (This did not stop a large number of cinemas from clos-
ing down when economic crisis struck in the 1990s.)
In many respects, this economic regime was of great benet to icaic
and Cuban cinema, but there were two more factors that helped to keep
production costs down, both of them the fruits of the Revolution in the
domain of the relations of production. One is that the economics of the
star system no longer exerted any inuence. Because the regime estab-
lished control over ination and rationalized salaries and wages, there
was no longer any pressure to keep increasing the pay of actors and spe-
cialized technical personnela major factor, since lm production is
labor-intensive, in the constantly increasing production costs in the cap-
italist lm industries. At the same time, icaics vertical integration also
accomplished the elimination of the numerous small individual com-
panies that buy and sell each other their services and facilities in every
capitalist lm industry, each one raking o its own prot. Under such a
system, the costs tend upwards, production is risky, employment uncer-
tain. At icaic, which came to employ about a thousand people in the
1980s, such uncertainty became a thing of the past (until the 1990s cre-
ated uncertainties of a dierent order, and icaic would lose many of
its personnel).
 CHAPTER FIVE
Amateurs and Militants

Perhaps more interesting than the professional cinema, according to

an article titled The Cinema in Cuba in the North American magazine
Film Culture in 1956, is the experimental cinema in 16 mm and the in-
tense action of the cine-clubs.1 The author of this article, Nstor Almen-
dros, the son of an exile from Francos Spain, was himself a member of
this movement. Like most of the acionados he was writing about, he
worked at the Film Institute when it was rst set up, but he was also one
of the rst lmmakers to leave Cuba as a result of disagreement with
icaics policies. Meeting with success in Paris as a cinematographer
with the New Wave directors, and later internationally, Almendros pub-
lished his own version of these disagreements in his autobiography,
Das de una cmara (A Man with a Camera).2 He rapidly became disillu-
sioned with icaic, he says, because icaic rapidly became bureaucratic
and intolerant of dierences of opinion. To be fair, he was already exper-
imenting with new styles of cinematography that were not yet appreci-
ated, and felt frustrated that the value of his experiments was not being
recognized. But there was clearly more to it than this, and to understand
more fully, one needs to go back to the acionado movement that icaic
grew out of. This movement involved a whole generation of Cuban
artists and intellectuals, for whom the attempt to create an independent
cinema was a symbol of cultural resistance and a way of forging a sense
of unity in their cultural aspirations. As the head of icaic, Alfredo
Guevara, later wrote:

90
 Amateurs and Militants 91

Only the cine-clubs, brave in their narrow eld, denounced the apologia
for violence [of the Hollywood movie] and supposed American superi-
ority, and opened a gap for a cinema of quality, discovering for the public
the signicance of schools and currents, the work and value of particular
directors, and the necessity, above all, of sharpening the critical spirit.
But in a closed ambience, and in the face of the hostility of the distri-
bution companies, and in some cases subject to police vigilance and
pressures, there was little they could do.3

However little, it included laying the foundations of a future lm cul-

ture. Police vigilance and pressures records the close links of many of
these aesthetic militants with active political opposition; but whatever
held the movement together, it was mainly a union of convenience, in
which certain rifts opened up when the inevitable political divisions were
brought out into the open after the victory of the Revolution. Not that
this impugns those who were trying to use lm as part of the political
struggle. On the contrary, it can be argued that the artistic openness of
the most militant members of the movement helped to win people over.

The movement rst developed during the 1940s. In 1945, the U.S. De-
partment of Commerce publication Industrial Reference Service (later
World Trade in Commodities) reported on the development of a new
market in Cuba:

The market potentialities for the sale to amateur users in Cuba of United
States motion-picture cameras and projectors are fair. It is estimated
that upon termination of the war about $3,500 worth of 16mm sound
projectors and $2,400 worth of silent 16mm projectors can be sold. Sales
of 8mm motion picture cameras are expected to be somewhat higher.4

This was the last paragraph in a detailed report that examined pros-
pects for the sale of various kinds of equipment in both the theatrical
and the nontheatrical markets. Nontheatrical users included schools,
the army and navy, commercial users, and amateurs. The expected sales
were not particularly large, even allowing for the higher value of the dol-
lar at the time. However, Cuba had been of interest to the United States
for some time as a kind of oshore testing laboratory for trying out new
technologies and techniques in the elds of media and communication.
Back in the mid-1920s, Cuba was, together with Puerto Rico, the
birthplace of the now massive communications corporation ittthe
same itt that oered the cia $1 million to destabilize the Popular
 92 Amateurs and Militants

Unity government in Chile in the early 1970s. itt was set up by sugar
brokers Sosthenes and Hernand Behn after they acquired a tiny Puerto
Rican telephone business in settlement of a bad debt. The company was
then built up on the success of the underwater cable link they laid be-
tween Havana and Miami.5 At the same time, radio arrived; the rst
transmissions in Cuba took place in 1922 and Cuba quickly became one
of Latin Americas most intensely developed broadcasting markets.6 By
1939, it had no less than eighty-eight radio stations and about 150,000
receivers. Mexico, by comparison, though many times larger, had only
a hundred stations and no more than 300,000 receivers. Argentina
had about 1.1 million receivers, but only about fty stations. This gave
Argentina the best ratio of sets to inhabitants in Latin America, approx-
imately 1:12, but the Cuban ratio (1:30) was better than the Mexican
(1:64). The ratio in the United States at the same time was 1:3.5 and in
Europe between 1:6 and 1:11.7
Because of the inherent problems of media programming and the
opportunities provided by language and national musical idioms, local
capital found that it was relatively easy to enter certain parts of the cul-
ture industry, while other areas remained the prerogative of foreign cap-
ital. The two media of radio and recordswhich are intimately linked
were also cheaper to enter and to operate than lm production after its
earliest years. The Cuban commentators Rodrguez and Prez recall
that the great collapse of sugar prices in 1920 and the resulting depres-
sion that ruined many small businesses, including the foremost lm
business of Santos y Artiga, who only survived by returning to their
earlier activity as circus proprietors; after this, local capital preferred to
look to the new activity of radio. (The circus of Santos y Artiga crops
up in Toms Gutirrez Aleas comedy Las doce sillas [The Twelve Chairs],
1962.) As for records, early technology was almost artisanal and easily
permitted small-scale local production, and it remained so for longer
than lm. Record production was already well established in Cuba be-
fore the advent of electrical recording in 1925. What electrical recording
did was give the North American companies new ways of moving in on
the Latin American market, but their control was still necessarily indirect.
They built factories for the manufacture of records made by local musi-
cians and produced by local companies who knew the market, and used
radio stations both as their aural shopwindow and to discover new talent.
 Amateurs and Militants 93

These media, taken together, are dierent from telephones and cables
and electricity, which, at the time of the Revolution, were 90 percent in
the hands of U.S. companies in Cuba, which owned and controlled them
directly; in the entertainments sector, a large part of the infrastructure
belonged to local capital. Electricity is a universal energy source requir-
ing powerful and expensive generators, as well as a guaranteed constant
fuel supply; telephones and cables are rst and foremost, as well as being
luxury items for personal use, instruments of communication for com-
mercial and industrial intelligence and trac. But the general availability
of telephones and cables in underdeveloped countries, like that of elec-
tricity, is always restricted. The entertainments media, in contrast, are
primarily directed to the exploitation of consumer leisure time, across
the widest possible social spectrum. They aim in underdeveloped coun-
tries to include the people who do not have electricity and telephones
in their homesor used not to. Radio thus enjoyed a second vogue
after the invention of the transistor in the 1950s, though nowadays the
shantytowns that encircle the cities increasingly have electricity, and
hence television, even if they still lack not only telephones, but also a
water supply and drainage system.
Every communications technology and each entertainment medium
manifests its own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies as a commodity, which
vary with the precise conditions of the environment in which they are
installed. The telephone everywhere accelerated, increased, and extended
commercial intercourse, but in Cuba it also served to let North Ameri-
can companies run their Cuban operations not as fully edged overseas
oces, but as local branches. It made it unnecessary for them to hold
large stocks of raw materials or spare parts when they could get on the
phone and have them rapidly shipped or own in from mainland depots
when they were needed. The same methods are nowadays employed by
transnational corporations throughout the world on the much larger
scale made possible by computerization, satellite communication, and jet
air transport. The advantages are not only economic: the corporations
are also in this way lifted beyond the control of the countries in which
their various branches are situated. Even in its simpler form in Cuba in
the 1950s, this system confronted the revolutionaries with dicult prob-
lems, for the companies concerned were easily able to operate an em-
bargo on supplies in the attempt to destabilize the new government.
 94 Amateurs and Militants

Radio also has peculiarities. The rst is that, for the listener who has
bought a receiver, the programs themselves are not commoditiesthey
do not have to be purchased individually. That is why radio becomes an
aural shopwindow for records, but also why it is dierent from them;
for the record that radio feeds o has the peculiarity of being linked to
the phonograph on which it is played. The record cannot go where the
phonograph does not go, just as the lightbulb cannot go where there is
no electricity. In this way, the development of advanced technologies
creates a greater and greater degree of interdependence of commodities.
But this interdependence is ideological as well as economicthe ide-
ological and the economic are two faces of the same process. Because, in
the case of radio, strictly speaking, the program is not a commodity that
yields an exchange value from the consumer, other ways must be found
of raising revenue to produce the programs without which the receiver
is pointless. The commercial broadcasting system created in the United
States and exported to Latin America does this by trading in a new com-
moditythe air space that is bought up by sponsors and advertisers (or
the slice of the audience that it sells them). The values of the commer-
cial publicity industry in this way invade and dominate the medium.
The development of commercial broadcasting in Latin America, how-
ever, was the result of inducement by the captains of industry in the
United States. They encouraged local capital to adopt the system on its
own account, to promote its own preservation and reproduction. This
is not to suggest some kind of conspiracy: little capitalists naturally imi-
tate big capitalists and big capitalists naturally encourage them to do
sothough they also hedge them in to prevent real competition. But
the result is still that the media become channels of ideological pene-
tration even when the programs they carry are not themselves pro-
duced abroad. They still automatically imitate the same values. These
values, however, are as foreign in Latin America and other dependent
countries as the technology that carries them, and can hardly fail to
deform the material that goes into the program, even if it is locally pro-
duced. The result is a central feature of the process that has been desig-
nated cultural imperialism.

We already know that cultural imperialism is not just a phenomenon of

the contemporary world. Before the ooding of the market with the
 Amateurs and Militants 95

products of the transnational entertainments corporations, there was,

for example, the colonization of literary taste, the process described by
Maritegui. The whole process started with the arrival of the conquista-
dores. As Alejo Carpentier explains in the opening lines of his classic
historical study of music in Cuba:

The degree of riches, vigour and power of resistance of the civilizations

which the conquistadores discovered in the New World always determined,
one way or another, the greater or lesser activity of the European invader
in the construction of architectural works and musical indoctrination.
When the peoples to be subjugated were already suciently strong,
intelligent and industrious enough to build a Tenochtitln or conceive
a fortress of Allanta, the Christian bricklayer and chorister went into
action with the greatest diligence, with the mission of the men of war
scarcely fullled. Once the battle of bodies was over, there began the
battle of the symbol.8

The power of the symbol, make no mistake, is a material power; though

intangible and subject to ambiguity, it has the durability of generations.
It operates frequently in the guise of myths, including the modern myths
that take on their paradigmatic forms in the movies, in the genres of the
western, the gangster movie, the thriller, the romance, the stories of rags
to riches, and all the rest. It is possible that the situation of the Holly-
wood lm industry gave it special insight into the ideological needs of
imperialism. In any event, as the lmmakers mastered the new narrative
art, it and they were pressed into telling tales that, to fulll the function
of a modern mythology, suppressed, as Roland Barthes has put it, the
memory of their fabrication and origins. The control of this symboliz-
ing, mythologizing faculty has been as much the object of the Holly-
wood monopolies as control of its economic functions, however un-
conscious and disguised their purposes become through ideological
rationalizations.
But the uses of lm are not limited to the commercial cinema. The
Industrial Reference Service 1945 report speaks of the development in
Cuba of the use of 16 mm substandard lm equipment both in educa-
tion and by private rms, not to mention the armed forces. It mentions
with approval the example of a local cigarette manufacturer who had be-
gun an advertising campaign using portable 16 mm equipmentan es-
tablished practice in the metropolis. In Britain, for example, the cigarette
 96 Amateurs and Militants

manufacturer Wills showed a one-reel sound-on-disc lm, How Wood-

bines Are Made, some eight thousand times in 1934 alone around the
workingmens clubs.9
This 16 mm gear was classed as substandard to separate it from the 35
mm equipment intended for commercial distribution in the cinemas.
Yet whatever the gauge, a camera is still a camera, a means of production
of lms, and the same thing happened in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s as
happened in Europe and North America in the 1930sthe emergence,
alongside sponsored documentaries and amateur cine, of a political lm
movement on the left. The later development of portable video would
similarly stimulate political responses, although in Cuba its introduc-
tion would be delayed.
If capitalism cannot resist marketing consumer versions of industrial
means of cultural production, it is inevitable that from Britain to Bolivia
people should conceive other purposes for its use, artistic or political,
than those recognized by the market and hegemonic ideologies. Histor-
ically, the reactions to the power of cinema as an ideological institution
were both aesthetic and political, and the two were not unconnected.
Aesthetic experiment by modernist artists in the 1920s fed into the rise
of workers lm movements in the 1930s. In revolutionary Russia, the
conuence of political and artistic imperatives produced the rst self-
consciously revolutionary cinema, which became a mixed paradigm for
political lm movements in the West, an exciting, stimulating, but largely
unattainable model. But its inuence spread far and wide. In Latin Amer-
ica, for example, wherever an organized and self-educating proletarian
vanguard emerged, it would typically engage in distributing Soviet lms
as part of its propaganda work.
In Cuba, political and artistic uses of lm were born on a very small
scale around the same moment, together with the appearance of ama-
teur cine, in the 1940s. By the end of the decade, as well as the children
of the nouveaux riches, there were both artists and militants among
Cuban acionadossometimes the same person was both. Artistic as-
pirations often found common ground with progressive politics, because
sycophants apart, to want to be an artist at all in Cuba was to have to
struggle for the right to be heard. The merely nouveaux riches were nat-
urally unconcerned with such problems. Film for them was pure diver-
sion. The icaic director Miguel Torres has described them as those
thousands of white-collars of our American countries, who launch them-
 Amateurs and Militants 97

selves on Sundays into feverish lming with amateur cameras and equip-
ment to assuage the oppression of their jobs.10 Some of them, with the
same aesthetic attitudes, invested spare money in the shoestring com-
panies that made local publicity lms and newsreels.
The newsreel business in Cuba was quite considerable. According to
the Industrial News Service of 1945:

There are six newsreel companies with laboratories which together pro-
duce an average of one-and-a-half million feet of positive newsreel a
year, and about 50,000 feet of commercial advertisements. The newsreel
companies do not intend to purchase new equipment but have some
photographic lighting equipment which they would like to dispose of.

(Perhaps someone had taken them for suckers and managed to sell
them more lighting equipment than they needed in that sunny clime.)
But what actually were all these companies doing? Two years later, in
1947, World Trade in Commodities, the successor to the Industrial Refer-
ence Service, revealed:

Dissemination of propaganda and publicity for individuals, clubs and

other groups, and the Government, is a chief function of Cuban news-
reels. News as understood in the United States is only an incidental
phase of newsreels. The propaganda arises from the fact that one or all
persons appearing in practically all newsreels pay the producer for this
privilege or else an organization pays for them. Fees from newsworthy
notables are an immeasurably larger source of studio incomes than
rental from theatres. Productora Nacional does not charge theatres
any rental. Noticiero Nacional has a sliding scale: $5 weekly to rst
run Havana theatres to as low as $5 monthly in some other places.
The father of a bride or the groom reimburses a producer for making
a newsreel record of a wedding. A nautical club pays to have pictures
made of some sporting event it sponsors. The ocial of a government
agency will pay to have included in a newsreel shots of construction
work on some public project. Large payments are made to newsreel
companies by political parties during a national election campaign.
No producers deny they are subsidized in the manner described by
news-signicant personages.11

The truth is that the newsreels were an ideological protection racket.

Their method was straightforward blackmail. One of icaics founding
members, Toms Gutirrez Alea, recalls it as a very dirty business: if
a newsreel cameraman were to happen upon a car crash, hed be sure to
take shots of the smashed-up car with its brand name in close-up, and
 98 Amateurs and Militants

blackmail the company to pay for them not to be shown.12 There was
only one commercial producer operating in Cuba in the 1950s, says Alea,
who was a serious and honorable person, the Mexican Manuel Bar-
bachano Ponce. He had produced three Mexican pictures of some qual-
ity and importance: Races (Roots, 1954), Torero! (1955), and Buuels
Nazarn (1958). Races was a four-episode lm that the French lm his-
torian Sadoul calls a striking portrait of contemporary Mexican Indian
life [that] avoids the extravagant pictorial style of many previous Mexi-
can lms.13 Directed by Benito Alazraki, it was scripted by a team that
included Barbachano himself and the documentary lmmaker Carlos
Velo, an exile from Francos Spain. Velo also directed Torero!, a ction-
alized documentary on the career of a well-known matador, which
Sadoul regards as a brilliant achievement. It is a formally experimental
lm in its use of newsreel footage, including footage of the matador
Luis Procua, regaining his fame in the last sequence, mixed with re-
enacted scenes in which Procua played himself. Future head of icaic
Alfredo Guevara worked for a period with Barbachano in Mexico; he
was assistant director on Nazarn. In Cuba, Barbachano produced Cine
Revista, a ten-minute lm magazine made up of brief advertisements
and short items of reportage, documentary, and sketches distributed
throughout the island. Alea, as well as Julio Garca Espinosa, gained ex-
perience through Cine Revista in both documentary and working with
actors. (The sketches, said Alea, gave him a certain taste for comedy.)
The two of them had studied lm at the beginning of the 1950s in the
Centro Sperimentale in Rome, when an important part of the experi-
ence lay in the political atmosphere in the country. They also both went
to Eastern Europe, in dierent years, to attend Youth Festivals. Back in
Cuba, they were both harassed and arrested, along with other cultural
activists, by Batistas anticommunist squad.

The roots of the sense of protest against cultural imperialism in Cuba

go back to the revolt of the Cuban intelligentsia in the 1920s, which was
spearheaded by the University Reform Movement. Its mood is portrayed
in Enrique Pineda Barnets historical feature Mella of 1975, a drama-
tized biography of the student leader Julio Antonio Mella, who became
one of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party. The Cuban stu-
dents who held the rst Revolutionary Students Congress in 1923 shared
the burgeoning consciousness of students in many places in Latin Amer-
 Amateurs and Militants 99

ica. The University Reform Movement was born in Crdoba, Argentina,

and quickly spread not only to Cuba but also to Chile, Uruguay, and
Peru, rallying students in an attack on old teaching systems and the elit-
ism of the academies. The continental character of the movement was
in part an expression of generalized hostility toward the new Washing-
ton doctrine of Pan-Americanism, to which the political leaders of the
day had widely succumbed in spite of some misgivings. It was also an
expression of the unease of a new generation in the process of discover-
ing what was later to be called underdevelopment. A number of emer-
gent radical political leaders cut their teeth in the movement, including
Vctor Ral Haya de la Torre in Peru, founder of the Alianza Popular
Revolucionaria Americana (apraAmerican Popular Revolutionary
Alliance). This was a radical party pledged to an anti-imperialist pro-
gram that rejected political, economic, or social structures based on for-
eign models. And was Hollywood cinema, then, not to be anathema?
apra became, through its successful populism, an obstacle to Com-
munist politics, and was condemned by Moscow in 1928. Does this mean
that Mella and the Cuban Communists surrendered their independence
to the Moscow decree? Whatever the historical evidence about this from
a political point of view, the Cuban Communists clearly manifested a
distinctive understanding of the nature of cultural imperialism, which
included cinema, and linked it with the control of information and the
denial of authentic artistic expression. Mella himself wrote a review of
Eisensteins October in a Mexican newspaper (he was assassinated in
Mexico in 1929) in which he explained:

The public, accustomed to the bourgeois style of the yanqui lm,

will not be able fully to appreciate the proper value of this eort from
Sovkino. It doesnt matter. It would be asking as much of them to
comprehend the proletarian revolution after hearing about it through
the cables of United Press, or the revolutionary movement of our own
country and our national characteristics through the interpretations
given them by Hollywood. However, here the ideological vanguards have
the opportunity to enjoy one of the most intense pleasures the present
epoch can oer in the terrain of art, through the youngest and most
expressive of the modern arts: motion photography.14

This analysis was further developed during the 1930s by J. M. Valds

Rodrguez, who in the 1940s went on to set up a lm studies depart-
ment at the University of Havana, one of the earliest such departments
 100 Amateurs and Militants

anywhere in the world. Hollywood, he said, in an article titled Holly-

wood: Sales Agent of American Imperialism in the North American
journal Experimental Cinema,

presents the Latin American people as the lowest, most repulsive

scoundrels on earth. A Latin, or Latin American, is always a traitor, a
villain. Years ago, there was not a picture that was without a Spanish or
Spanish-American villain. In Strangers May Kiss they present a little
Mexican town: the owner of the old posada (inn) is a drunkard and
the mozo (servant, waiter) is a similar character; the streets with three
feet of mud; countless beggars; licentious girls.
I remember, too, the picture Under the Texas Moon, openly oensive
to Mexican women, the projection of which in a movie-house in the
Latin section of New York City provoked a terrible tumult. The tumult
was caused by the enraged protest of a few Mexican and Cuban students,
in which one of the former . . . was killed.15

The whole population of Cuba, he continued, suered drastically from

the inuence of Hollywood pictures: workers, peasants, and artisans,
petit bourgeois and bourgeois all alike. The bourgeoisie, so complete was
its identication with the American Dream, no longer accepted Euro-
pean lms, as its better education might lead one to expect, while young
people were induced to imitate the youth they saw in the North Ameri-
can pictures. From this there arose, said Valds Rodrguez, a conict,
between the traditional patriarchal society of Cuba, on the one hand,
and, on the other, new imported values that youngand even adult
people were beginning to adopt in matters such as family relationships
and (heterosexual) love. The image of the American Dream produced
only wild parties, necking orgies, licentiousness, miscomprehension of
what free love really means, gross sensuality, lack of control over the
lower passions, and a narrow, American, utilitarian conception of life,
the ardent praise of those who win, no matter how. A degenerative in-
uence on Cuban society was also to be seen in the Hollywood treat-
ment of the black. Cuba, said Valds Rodrguez, had not previously suf-
fered the same terric racial antagonisms:

The rst act of the Cuban patriots of 1868the majority of them were
slave ownerswas to declare their Negroes free. So in both wars of
independence . . . Negroes and whites fought for liberty, shoulder to
shoulder, against the tyranny of Spain, their old enemy. . . . But things
are changing, owing to the Hollywood pictures and to the Cuban youth
 Amateurs and Militants 101

in America. In American lms, Negroes are cowards, superstitious,

dumb. . . . This depiction of their race has evidently aected the Negroes
condence in themselves.
Intellectual and artistic rebelliousness in Cuba in the 1920s found its
voice not only in the University Reform Movement but also in the Grupo
Minorista, with its journal Revista de Avance, and in the artistic move-
ment of Afro-Cubanism, which expressed itself most strongly in music
and poetry. The Grupo Minorista met in Havana in the Hotel Lafayette,
a gathering place of writers and painters, poets, sculptors, and musi-
cians. Some of them were involved in an incident in May 1923 at the
Academy of Sciences, remembered as the Protest of the Thirteen,
when the writer Rubn Martnez Villena spoke out in the presence of a
cabinet minister against bureaucratic embezzlement on behalf of a group
of thirteen protesters, a demonstration for which they were prosecuted.
In 1927, the year in which the groups Revista de Avance appeared, they
again linked the demand for freedom for cultural development with
political protest in a roundly anti-imperialist manifesto; it condemned
the outrage of pseudodemocracy and the farce of elections without
eective participation, calling at the same time for the revision of false
and threadbare values, for the reform of education, and for vernacular
and modern art.16
Afro-Cubanism began as a quest for the roots of a Cuban national
culture, and the elements that made it distinctive. Another member of
the Grupo Minorista, Juan Marinello, explained that a return to the
roots in Cuba, in the same way as elsewhere in Latin America in the
1920s, produced dierent results, because in Cuba the indigenous In-
dian population had not survived. Certainly, Cuba was part of Latin
Americaindeed, it was where Columbus rst set foot in 1492. The na-
tive population, however, had been wiped out in the space of fty years
almost without the conquistadores noticing what they were doing
only the churchman Bartolom de Las Casas observed and condemned.
Consequently, where throughout most of Latin America the new artis-
tic explorations of the 1920s became indigenist in character, in Cuba
there were no indigenous roots to be found; they were African, because
they lay in the culture of the population with which the slave trade re-
placed the missing native when workers were needed to develop the
plantation economy. The same thing had happened in the English- and
French-speaking Caribbean, but they had a dierent colonial history,
 102 Amateurs and Militants

and slavery there was abolished earlier. A similar phenomenon is also

found in certain other Latin American countries, such as parts of Brazil
and Venezuela, in regions where indigenous populations were wiped
out or driven back.
In Cuba, however, being an island, the cultural consequences were
particularly acute. Because of continuing Spanish rule, slaves continued
to arrive in Cuba much after everywhere else except Brazil, where aboli-
tion was also delayed. Certain traits of African culture and its symbol-
isms remained more immediate in these two countries as a result. In
Cuba, at the time of the Revolution, there were still people who had
learned African languages from a grandparent, and Santera, in which
Catholic saints are syncretized with African deities, was widely prac-
ticed (and since then has survived years of ocial disapproval).
In Cuba, declares Marinello, the black participated in the liberation
struggle against Spain; in fact, black participation was decisive. General
Antonio Maceo and the journalist Gualberto Gmez were two of the
acknowledged leaders, and they are not the only ones. In fact, there are
two respects in which the nineteenth-century Cuban independence
struggle was a modelthe participation of black people and its inter-
nationalist character: it attracted a number of liberation ghters from
the Spanish Caribbean and beyond. Both these factors gave Cuba great
advantages in subsequent stages of struggle. The political orientation of
the Grupo Minorista owed a great deal to the independence movement.
The movement had the support of the Federation of Cuban Workers, in
which Cuban trade unionism was born, and its leaders, although not
fully formed as socialists, were passionate adherents of the idea of the
social republic represented for them by the Paris Commune of 1871 or
the Spanish Federal Republic of 187475.17
From a cultural point of view, black participation was equally deci-
sive. The black, said Marinello, is the marrow and root, the breath of
the people. . . . He may, in these times of change, be the touchstone of
our poetry.18 And in the poetry of Nicols Guilln that began to appear
at the end of the 1920s, the Afro-Cuban movement found a native voice.
Guilln brought earlier experiments in Afro-Cubanism to ower. In im-
itating the rhythms of Afro-Cuban dance, and borrowing the verbal
patterns and repetitions of voodoo and Santera ceremonies, this poetry
is imbued with a sense of social reality and criticism, and speaks with
 Amateurs and Militants 103

the voices of real characters in real situations, with their argot and ac-
cents. The result was a new and shocking linguistic authenticity.
Something similar happened in music. Alejo Carpentier wrote the
scenario of an Afro-Cuban ballet composed by Amadeo Roldn, La Re-
bambaramba, which they researched in visits to the ceremonies of the
Abaku, a secret religious society of African origin. It was the rst of a
series of works through which Roldn achieved international renown,
alongside composers like Varse, as an enfant terrible. Carpentier has
recorded that one of the inuences was Stravinsky:19 the extraordinary
rhythmic pulse of The Rite of Springsomething quite unprecedented in
European art musicwhich they got to know from the score, showed
Roldn how to compose the dicult cross-rhythms involved, in other
words, how to notate and thereby carry into the theater and the concert
hall the inections and fusion of African rhythms with the melodic
lines of the Spanish and French dance forms, which in another variant
also lies at the root of jazz.

The Cuban Communist Party did not remain content with critical and
theoretical observations about cinema. At the end of the 1930s, it under-
took to make lms of its own. The earliest political lms made in Cuba
date from 193940, when the newspaper Hoy, organ of the Partido Socia-
lista Popular (psp), as the party was then called, produced its rst news-
reel, to be shown at union meetings and in the open air. The cameraman
was Jos Tabo, who twenty years later joined icaic.
Tabo was one of a group who set up a small production company,
Cuba-Sono-Films, at the beginning of the 1940s, whose rst lm was
another collaboration with Carpentier. According to Agramonte, the
protagonists of this lm, El desahucio (The sacking) were the workers
building Route 20, and it showed scenes of high emotion around the
social theme it dealt with.20 The list of Cuba-Sono-Films titles amounts
to a catalog of party activities, though it didnt survive for long. But
they took to making lms again at the end of the decade, and again a
future member of icaic was involved. Toms Gutirrez Alea was not a
party member. He was a law student at the university with the ambition
to make lms. He worked on two lms for the psp, one of a May Day
demonstration that had been banned but went ahead anyway, the other
on the World Peace Movement.21 His name also gures among the non-
 104 Amateurs and Militants

political acionados, those other radical intellectuals of the educated

middle classes whose aspirations were mainly artistic. His rst lms were
made on 8 mm in 1946 (La caperucita roja [Little Red Riding Hood])
and 1947 (Un fakir), when he also teamed up with Nstor Almendros,
the Spanish exiles son, to make an adaptation of a Kafka story called
Una confusin cotidiana (An everyday confusion).
The Photographic Club of Cuba held the islands rst amateur cine
competition in 1943. Something of its character can be gleaned from the
titles of lms that were shown. They included La vida de los peces (The
life of the sh); Varadero (the name of one of Cubas nest but, before
the Revolution, private beaches, sited on the same promontory where
the North American chemicals millionaire Du Pont built his mansion);
and Desle gimnstico femenino (Feminine gymnastic display), which
won the gold medal! Competitions like these are part of every amateur
cine movement. Similar titles with appropriate dierences would be
found in any ten best list of British amateur cine in the 1930s, when it
was a province of the upper classes and even the aristocracy, who made
up little amateur dramatics for the camera and lmed their favorite pas-
times. An exception cropped up in 1943 called Vida y triunfo de un pura
sangre criollo (Life and triumph of a pure-blood Creolea play on
words), which Valds Rodrguez described as the only one of these lms
with social and economic implications.22
A much more reliable guide in these matters than Almendros is Valds
Rodrguez, who was the mentor of the oppositional lm culture that
was developing during this period: Alfredo Guevara speaks with warmth
of the inuence he had both on himself and others of his generation in
stimulating an awareness of lm. He had followed a beg, borrow, and
steal policy, Guevara recalls, to build up an archive of lms that never
entered commercial distribution in Cuba.23 Agramonte records that Valds
Rodrguez went to the United States in 1941 armed with a letter from
the university to Nelson Rockefeller, as a result of which the Museum of
Modern Art started sending them lms. Later, he made similar arrange-
ments with the French Cinmathque.24
The University of Havana, where Valds Rodrguez introduced lm
studies, had been one of the focal points of the countrys political fer-
ment since the days of Julio Antonio Mella and the University Reform
Movement. In the same conversation in which he spoke of Valds Rod-
rguezs inuence, Alfredo Guevara also mentioned that he had only just
 Amateurs and Militants 105

discovered, from a book he was reading, how many of the professors

when he was a student in Havana had, unbeknownst to him at the time,
been active in the political struggles of the 1930s, not just the historian
Ral Roa, whom everyone knew about because he had emerged as a
leader of the Revolution. The whole generation had been politicized by a
revolutionary struggle in which a small vanguard of the Cuban prole-
tariat had seized the moment to declare its own short-lived soviets: fruit
of the opposition to the dictator Machado whom Batista displaced
when he seized power for the rst time as a young sergeant.
In the late 1940s, when Fidel Castro was a politically active law student,
the university was frequently the scene of violent political confronta-
tions between rival factions, in which gunslinging solutions to political
quarrels were a constant liability, a product of the disintegration of Cuban
political life. Castro once remarked that his four years at the university
were more personally dangerous than the whole time he spent ghting
Batista from the Sierra Maestra. Yet in 1950, the university was also the
location where a group of students set up a radical cultural society with
the name Nuestro Tiempo (Our Times). They belonged to the students
union cultural group and included Alfredo Guevara.
Guevarathe son of a railway engineering worker who was one of
the founders of the railway workers unionbegan his political career
as a schoolboy adherent of anarcho-syndicalism in the struggle against
Batistas rst government in the late 1930s. By the late 1940s, he had
joined the Communist Party and it was then, while at university, that he
rst came into contact with Fidel Castro. They rst knew each other as
political rivals in Student Federation elections in which Castro failed to
get elected but Guevara succeeded. The two became friends when they
went to Colombia together in April 1948, as members of a small delega-
tion to a meeting of Latin American students that was being sponsored
by the Argentinian regime of Juan Pern. The Cubans were due to meet
the Colombian Liberal Party leader Jorge Gaitn, to discuss his possible
participation in the student congress that the meeting in Bogot had
been called to plan. On April 9, just before this meeting with Gaitn was
about to take place, the Colombian politician was assassinated. The
popular uprising which that sparked o in protest is known to history
as the Bogotazothe Bogot explosion. The Cuban students joined in,
and took part in an attack on a police station from which ries were taken
and distributed among the people; they escaped arrest by taking refuge
 106 Amateurs and Militants

in the Cuban embassy, and returned to Havana in a Cuban government

chartered plane.25 Although Castro and Guevara followed dierent po-
litical courses over the next few years, the Bogotazo constituted a shared
moment in both mens political development. Their mutual rsthand
knowledge of a moment of popular insurrection gave them a common
point in their understanding of the political pulse of their own country.
Recalling the episode in conversation, Guevara emphasized how forma-
tive an experience it was for them by comparing it with the events that
took place almost exactly twenty years later in Paris in 1968, of which,
this time as a representative of the victorious Cuban Revolution, he also
happened to be a rsthand witness.
Nuestro Tiempo came to play a central role in the cultural politics of
the Cuban Communists during the 1950s. The policy of the society in-
cluded a radical program of activities both within the university and in
the local community beyond its precinctsthe campus was on the edge
of a working-class neighborhood. These activities were such that, fol-
lowing Batistas coup in 1952, members of the society were considered,
says Agramonte, subversive agents.26 Jos Antonio Gonzlez, author of
an article in Cine Cubano titled Notes for the History of a Cinema with-
out History, says of Nuestro Tiempo that the organization of the lm
club and the lm cycles it mounted, the pamphlets and the magazine it
produced, in reality masked clandestine and semiclandestine work by
the Communist Party among the intellectuals, and organized opposi-
tion to the National Institute of Culture set up by the tyranny.27 The
composer Harold Gramatges, president of Nuestro Tiempo, has explained:
Nuestro Tiempo fullled a historic role during the Batista dictatorship.
Formed at the beginning of 1950, [it] brought together young people
who were pursuing their artistic or cultural activities in dispersal and in
hostile surroundings . . . in a domineering republic consisting in a regime
of semicolonial exploitation and misery, the art-public relationship was
limited to a privileged class . . . and aided by the presence of a number of
members of the Young Communists, Nuestro Tiempo embarked . . . with
considerable impetus on what was designated the job of a united front
[trabajo de frente-nico] . . . the task of proselytising among the youthful
masses. . . . We organized ourselves into sections: lm, theater, puppetry,
music, dance, plastic arts, and literature . . . [we] produced publications
on cinema, theater, and music, and . . . the magazine Nuestro Tiempo.28
In 1953, the year of Marts centenary and of the abortive attack on the
Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba led by Fidel, Nuestro Tiempo
 Amateurs and Militants 107

was reorganized and its work extended by the party committee respon-
sible for cultural work, which was composed of Juan Marinello, Mirta
Aguirre, and Carlos Rafael Rodrguez. As the repression sharpened, the
society was attacked in the press by local apologists for the United States.
Its directors were interrogated by Batistas intelligence agencies, the sim
(Servicio de Intelligencia Militar [Military intelligence service]) and the
brac (Bur para la Represin de las Actividades Comunistas [Oce
for repression of communist activities]). But Batista never quite dared
to close Nuestro Tiempo down.
However, he entertained considerable cultural pretensions. To round
o the ocial celebrations of the Mart centenary, he decided to bring
to Havana the Bienal exhibition from Francos Spain, adding to it the
cream of Cuban plastic arts, for which he oered the incentive of large
prizes. But, as Jos Antonio Portuondo, an intellectual of the 1930s gen-
eration, has recalled, the great majority of Cuban artists refused to collab-
orate in this salon and a large counterexhibition was organized. Older
and younger artists all participated, not, says Portuondo, for formal rea-
sons, but out of deance, and a refusal to let Cuban art serve the inter-
ests of a Hispanic concept of Cuban culture. Batista held his Bienal in
January 1954 to inaugurate the Museum of Fine Arts, but the most
estimable Cuban artists exhibited instead at the Lyceum, went o to the
Tejada gallery in Santiago de Cuba, and returned to Havana by way of
Camagey. It was a truly rebel exhibition.29
Portuondo adds that this exhibition was made up predominantly not
of art with political content but essentially of abstract art, rearming
the condition of abstract art as an expression of protest in the face of
capitalist decadence. Behind the rhetorical formulation, it is signi-
cant that these views were held in the 1950s, during the Cold War, by
Communist Party members, when the Moscow orthodoxy was that
abstract painting was itself the very expression of capitalist decadence.
Evidently, this is not quite the same orthodox and even collaborationist
Communist Party that various anticommunist left-wing commentators
have held it to be. The united-front approach to cultural politics made
it possible to create a bond within the cultural movement of the 1950s
between artists and intellectuals of dierent political extractions. It is
hardly surprising to nd that they included some who later turned out
to have supported anti-imperialist objectives principally because this
appeared the best route to personal artistic aims, oering the promise
 108 Amateurs and Militants

of liberal freedoms that did not and could not have existed under the
dictatorship. Naturally, they came into conict with those who had come
to be revolutionaries rst and artists second, who gave their political
engagement primacy over their aesthetic ambitions because they re-
garded the second as impossible to achieve without fullling the rst.
But these splits were only incipient during the 1950s, a time when
ocial culture was on the defensive, powerless to resist the cultural
penetration of North American imperialism. The work of Nuestro
Tiempo and similar groups had the eect of intensifying ideological
confrontation in the domain of cultural activity, and the Catholics too
entered the cine-club eld. The church in Cuba had set up a cinema com-
mission just before the Second World War that afterwards became a
member of the international Catholic cinema organization. The churchs
strategy seems to have taken a new turn in the early 1950s, when it
started setting up cine-clubs of its own, in which it showed major lms
accompanied by cine-debates. The chronology suggests that this was at
least in part a response to the initiative of the leftist militants. The
Catholic cine-clubs in turn stimulated further development of the idea,
spawning cine-clubs around the country that were not directly under
the churchs control and only loosely linked with the central organiza-
tion. A report presented to the Congress of the International Catholic
Oce of Film, which was held in Havana in 1957, listed forty-two clubs
of this kind.30

These were the ways in which lm came to occupy its key position in
radical cultural consciousness in Cuba. Because of its special nature
an industrialized art and agent of cultural imperialism, on the one hand;
on the other, the indigenous art form of the twentieth century and the
vehicle of a powerful new mode of perceptionbecause of this dual
nature, lm readily and acutely synthesized the whole range of cultural
experience for a whole generation. Cinema was at the same time an
instrument of oppression and an object of aspiration. What happened
was that the monopolistic practices of the Hollywood majors and their
local dependents not only created a frustrated cultural hunger among
acionados of cinema in Cuba, but, combined with their own attempts
at making lms, this turned cinema into a battleeld of cultural poli-
tics. The cine-club movement represented a breach in the defenses of
cultural imperialism, and in this battleeld lie the origins of icaic.
 Amateurs and Militants 109

Nuestro Tiempo was one of two principal recruiting grounds for

future members of icaic: Alfredo Guevara, Toms Gutirrez Alea, Julio
Garca Espinosa, Jos Massip, and Santiago lvarez were all active mem-
bers; Manuel Octavio Gmez contributed short stories to the societys
magazine. There was also the Cine-Club Visin, situated in a working-
class district of Havana, which drew its membership not only from
radical intellectuals, but also from the local people. The composer Leo
Brouwer made his debut as a young guitarist under its auspices, and
other members who were later to join icaic include the lm editors
Norma Torrado, Nelson Rodrguez, and Gloria Argelles and the camera-
man Luis Costales. The director Manuel Prez recalls that through the
club you could get hold of books on cinema that came from Argentina,
by Sadoul, Kuleshev, Balazs, Pudovkin, and Chiarini, and it created a
cultural ambience where discussion on the lms was of a strongly polit-
ical nature.31
Of the acionado lms of the 1950s the most signicant is El Megano,
directed by Julio Garca Espinosa, a documentary using neorealist recon-
struction to denounce the miserable conditions of the charcoal burners
in a region of the Zapata Swamps after which the lm is named. Garca
Espinosa started o in theater, rapidly moving from bourgeois melo-
drama to the popular vernacular stage, where he acted and directed.
But then he went to work in radio, for a commercial station, producing
adaptations for a program called Misterios en la historia del mundo (Mys-
teries of world history). It was in Italy, he recalls, following the debates
of the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti and talking with other Latin
Americansthere was a group of them that published a small cultural
magazine with anti-imperialist politicsthat he rst developed a proper
idea of Marxism. He had gone there because some neorealist lms they
had shown in Cuba had excited him. He did not at that time yet have
much of an idea of the relationship between politics and art. But a
chance experience made him think hard about it. At an open-air meet-
ing in Rome that Togliatti was addessing, he met the man who had played
the lead in Vittorio De Sicas famous Bicycle Thief (1948). He learned
what a miserable life this man now led, and how he had felt frustration
and indignity when he was approached to gure in an advertising cam-
paign for a bicycle rm! People talk about the aesthetics of nonprofes-
sional screen acting, said Garca Espinosa, but no one ever asks what
happens to these people in their real lives afterwards.32
 110 Amateurs and Militants

El Megano became something of a cause clbre when it was seized

by Batistas police after its rst screening at the University of Havana.
Julio Garca Espinosa, as head of the group that made it, was taken away
for interrogation. He was released on condition that they bring the lm
to the police. The group used the breathing space to look for a way of
getting a copy made. Francisco Ichazo, a prominent intellectual with o-
cial contacts, warned Garca Espinosa that the U.S. embassy was con-
cerned. Finally, he was interviewed by the head of the secret police. Did
you make this lm? the man asked. Do you know this lm is a piece of
shit? Do you know, replied Garca Espinosa, that its an example of
neorealism? and proceeded to explain. The man, he remembers, listened
patiently and then said, Not only is the lm a piece of shit, but you also
talk a lot of shit. Stop eating shit and go and make lms about Batista!
That, he recalls, was my rst intervention as a theorist!33
With music by Juan Blanco, El Megano had taken a year to make, shoot-
ing on location on weekends and then borrowing facilities in Havana
for postproduction, including dubbing sessions for which the peasant
actors in the lm came up to the big city. Neorealism was a strong ele-
ment in the lms style, in the shaping of the narrative, and in the use of
nonprofessional actors, but the lm can also be taken as belonging to a
tradition of documentary denunciation incorporating reenactment that
goes back both to Borinage of 1934, by Joris Ivens and Henri Storck, and
some of the work of the British documentary movement of the 1930s.
At the same time, an understanding of the media, and how to take
them into account when thinking about political strategy, had become
generalized within Cuban political life in proportion to the intensity
with which the Cuban market had been developed in its role as oshore
testing laboratory for yanqui capital. In a book full of statistics pur-
porting to show his achievements that he published in Mexico in 1961,
Batista boasts of Cubas leading position in Latin America in radio and
television: 160 radio stations and one radio set to every ve inhabitants
in 1958, and twenty-three television stations and one set to every twenty.34
Regarded by Batista as one of the indices of how advanced Cuba was
and therefore how unjust the rebellion, the presence of the media in
fact contributed to his downfall through the variety of uses they were
put to in the unfolding of the struggle against his dictatorship. As Lionel
Martin has reported:
 Amateurs and Militants 111

The July 26th Movement, which had strong backing among professionals,
penetrated some of Cubas publicity agencies. Cubans still laugh about
the advertisements for Tornillo Soap that followed the ocial newscasts.
After the Batista government handouts were read, the announcer would
burst in with Dont believe in tales, womanTornillo Soap washes best
of all. Also memorable were the Bola Roja bean advertisements that
followed the news. The word bola as used in Cuba can be variously trans-
lated ball (like a round bean) or rumor [hence bola rojared
rumor].
Just a week before Batista ed, a two-page advertisement for Eden
cigarettes showed a man with a pack of Edens in one hand and a book
in the other entitled High Fidelity. Newspapers were ordered to stop
running another advertisement showing a man with a watch on his
wrist, above the caption This is the watch that went to the Antarctic.
The mans face closely resembled Fidel Castros, complete with beard
and military cap.35

Episodes like these inspired the plot line of a debut feature by Fer-
nando Prez in 1986, Clandestinos, about life in the urban underground.
The best-known example of the revolutionaries use of the media is the
radio station, Radio Rebelde, set up by the guerrillas in the Sierra, which
kept the population, friend and foe, informed of the course of the strug-
gle from the rebels point of view. The achievement of Radio Rebelde
was that even those who rejected its propagandistic voice knew that
what it said impugned Batista and his censorship.
Castro had already envisaged the use of radio at the time of the attack
on the Moncada barracks in 1953. The attack was supposed to instigate a
provincial uprising in which local radio stations would be taken over
and used to win the support of the masses throughout the country. This
was not a scheme that Castro dreamed up out of nothing. He already
had rsthand experience of radio and its powers and limitations. He
had broadcast a regular series of political talks on a sympathetic radio
station while practicing law and trying every legal means to expose the
corruption of the government. Moreover, he had been a follower of
Eduardo Chibas, leader of the populist and reformist political party
known as the Ortodoxos. Chibas, too, was a well-known broadcaster, who
maintained that radio broadcasts were as deadly in the political sphere as
weapons. He took this belief to the ultimate conclusion when he reached
the end of his political tether in 1951: unable to defend unscrupulous
 112 Amateurs and Militants

charges that his opponents had made against him, he took out a gun at
the end of a broadcast and shot himself. Castro was in the studio watch-
ing. It was a futile gesture, but after Batista seized power the following
year, the media kowtowed by promising to bar demagogues from using
them.
Nor was this the rst time a politician had died on the radio. In 1947,
Emilio Tr, leader of a left-wing terrorist group with which Castro was
said by some to be associated, was caught by a rival group at dinner
with the chief of police in a house in the Havana suburbs. A fantastic
three-hour gun battle that ended in Trs eighteen-bullet-hole death
was broadcast live by an enterprising station. Television, introduced into
Cuba in 1950, was also drawn into the political arena, as images of po-
litical violence inevitably began to reach the television screen. In 1955,
for example, the Cuban national baseball championship was interrupted
by students rushing onto the eld with anti-Batista banners and being
savagely beaten up by the police in full view of the cameras.36
Fidels use of television after the Revolution is famous, and was cer-
tainly signicant. He never had any diculty appearing when he wanted
to, although both radio and television remained, to begin with, in pri-
vate hands. But then Fidel made very good TV, and he used the medium
extremely creatively. Television not only extended the reach of his speeches
beyond the enormous public he attracted in person, it was also a means
that could be used between the big rallies. The way Fidel used television
dees Marshall McLuhans notorious slogan the medium is the mes-
sage and its corollary, that the message of a medium is the change of
scale or pace or pattern that it introduces.37 From this one would have
to suppose that what mattered was not what Fidel said, but only that he
used television at all. But he didnt appear on television to perform a
mime act, he used it to speak to the greatest number of people, to inform
about developing situations, to announce and explain decisions or make
policy declarations. Obviously, some people will call this demagogy, but
what Fidel actually achieved was something else. There is with tele-
vision a frustration in the impossibility the viewer normally feels of
participating. Fidel, in speaking on television not only to the people but
also for them, performed a vital vicarious role, and his appearances
became the conuence of politics and entertainment. It is a role he has
repeated in a number of icaics lms, lms that yield a great deal of
 Amateurs and Militants 113

insight into his relationship with the people. But that is something we
shall come back to.
For their part, the leaders of North American society had emerged
from the Second World War more aware than ever of the ideological as
well as the commercial functions of the communications media. Things
had come a long way from the earlier days of modern communications
technology when the leading capitalists had rst become aware of the
need to take control of the channels of communication for their own
intelligence purposesfor example, when the banker J. Pierpont Morgan
bought into the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1882 in order to
safeguard the secrecy of his cables. By the end of the Second World War,
North American capital fully understood the signicance for it of con-
trolling communications on a global scale: in 1944, the business maga-
zine Fortune declared that on the eciency of U.S.-owned international
communications depends whether the United States will grow in the
future, as Great Britain has in the past, as a center of world thought
and trade. . . . Great Britain provides an unparalleled example of what a
communications system means to a great nation standing athwart the
globe.38 The United States thus embarked on new oensives after the
war, including the establishment in Mexico in 1946 of the Asociacin
Interamericana de Radiofusin (Inter-American radio association), with
its acronym, air: an organization bringing radio stations across the con-
tinent under its wing, ostensibly in the name of freedom, and to combat
attempts at interference in broadcasting by governments in the countries
to which the member stations belonged. Behind the ideological smoke-
screen, air was an instrument of Cold War propaganda.
At the other extreme from such grandiose schemes, the Cuban rebels
were adept at the imaginative use of the small-scale communications
equipment available to them. What must have been the sensation of the
soldiers of the dictator in the eld in 1958, nding themselves addressed
by Fidel Castro himself through loudspeakers?39 The rebels knew how
to take advantage of the mass media. In December 1956, shortly after
the disaster that occurred when the expeditionary force on the Granma
landed, Batistas army declared that the rebels had been defeated. A few
days later, while the rebels regrouped, one of them went to Havana to
contact the media and set up an interview with the rebel leader. Against
the wishes of the Cuban authorities, Herbert Matthews of the New York
 114 Amateurs and Militants

Times obliged. A week later, Castro, who had been in desperate need of
publicity, was known throughout the world. Batista denied the interview
had really taken place. The Times replied by publishing a photograph of
Matthews with Castro. The regimes credibility was destroyed and its
principal ocials humiliated.
Che Guevara spoke about the use of the media to a meeting of Nuestro
Tiempo very soon after the victory of the Revolution. Of the early days
in the Sierra, he said, At that time the presence of a foreign journalist,
preferably American, was more important to us than a military vic-
tory.40 It should not surprise us that he spoke of this to this particular
audience, or that in this address he launched many of the ideas he after-
wards developed into a more consistent philosophy, ideas that had a
crucial inuence on the development of the Revolution.
 PA RT I I
The Revolution Takes Power:
A Cinema of Euphoria
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER SIX
The Coming of Socialism

The victory of the Revolution on January 1, 1959, brought about a urry

of documentary lmmaking. Two commercial producers brought out
feature-length compilation lms, De la sierra hasta hoy (From the Sierra
to today) and De la tirana a la libertad (From tyranny to liberty), the
latter an expanded version of a lm rst seen the previous year under
the title Sierra Maestra. Shorts to celebrate the Revolution were produced
by bodies such as the municipality of Havana (A las madres cubanas
[To Cuban mothers]) and the ministry of education (Algo ms que piedra
[Something more than stone]), the former based on a letter from Jos
Mart to his mother in 1869, the latter on a poem of the popular poet El
Indio Nabori dedicated to Mart.
Meanwhile, the trade annual, in what was to be its last edition,
reprinted from the newspaper Prensa Libre an article titled The Second
Movement, rhetorically voicing the faith of the anti-Batista business
community in the new beginning. The title is a reference to what was
ironically known as the Movement of the Second of January, the group-
ing of established bourgeois politicians who, as a distinguished foreign
visitor, Jean-Paul Sartre, later observed, stole assistance from the vic-
tory. These people put in a good word for themselves to the victors,
letting it be known that they would accept the burden of power if it were
ever so slightly oered to them. Sartre compared them with those uni-
forms smelling of moth balls that one saw appear in September 1944 on
the streets of Paris.1

117
 118 The Coming of Socialism

The article from Prensa Libre roundly declared that in this glorious
and necessary hour . . . work is the order of the day. If there arent su-
cient technicians, bring them in, because posterity accepts no excuses.
It advocated the reintroduction of constitutional rights, not salvation-
ism, which could degenerate into repugnant totalitarianism. And not to
impede it, the leader of the revolution must turn himself into a political
leader, and bring the citizen to the ballot box with the same faith as last
year, when he led them into combat.2 This from a publication that two
years earlier had announced: We have not for many years had an eco-
nomic perspective as promising as that of 1957 . . . because cinemalike
few other activitiesdepends for its progress on the country being con-
tent and the money supply in the streets being uid and consistent. . . .
Thus everything seems to indicate that 1957 will be a bonanza year for
the lm trade.3 In fact, most Cuban capitalists did well that year, but
not the lm business. The urban underground began bombing cinemas.
Some of the audience was frightened away.
But the Rebel Army was not about to abandon its ideals and return
the country to the anarchy that immediate elections would inevitably
entail. Masses of people decidedly declared their support on the streets.
They greeted the rebels with a nationwide general strike that frustrated
the salvage attempts of the old order to grab back power sans Batista.
And in the months that followed, as the former bourgeois opposition to
the dictatorship opposed every piece of revolutionary legislation, the
masses lled the squares in huge rallies to approve the Revolution.
The Rebel Army in the Sierra had done more than just ght. They had
informed and encouraged the population through their radio station
Radio Rebelde, and demonstrated their principles through introduc-
ing, in the areas they controlled, the rst real administration of justice
the Cuban campesino had ever seen. They had gained experience in how
to organize both supply lines and popular campaigns. They had brought
to the Cuban countryside for the rst time both medical attention and
education. Over the two-year campaign, they had set up thirty schools,
where both the campesino and their own ranks sat down to learn at the
same time. And thus they were poised to engage the political tasks cre-
ated by their victory.
These tasks were formidable. The existing bureaucratic administra-
tion was riddled with Batista collaborators. The biggest sh ed imme-
 The Coming of Socialism 119

diately, followed by a growing ood of frightened rich, the incorrigibly

bourgeois, and the retinue of professionals, operatives, and technical en-
gineers who depended on them. The atmosphere is portrayed in Jess
Dazs Polvo rojo (Red dust) of 1982, the story of a technician at a North
Americanowned nickel plant who remains in Cuba to run things when
not only the other technicians and administrators but even his family
leave for the States.
The Rebel Army established order, occupied radio stations, arranged
for the publication of newspapers. It manifested from the outset an
awareness of the importance of the means of mass communications. It
brought to its tasks a zeal and an optimism, indeed a euphoria that some-
times bordered on overoptimism, which impressed every honest visitor.
A North American economist, Edward Boorstein, who worked with the
planning agencies set up by the Rebel Army, has recorded that the atmo-
sphere intoxicated almost everyone, Cubans and foreigners alike.4
And the Rebel Army improvised. At the Agrarian Reform Institute,
says Boorstein, there was no comprehensive, detailed and nished agri-
cultural policy . . . nor could there have been. There were many ideas.
And there was also the method that Napoleon explained when he was
asked how he determined the tactics to be followed in a battle. On
sengage, et puison voit. You get into the action, and thenyou see.
Boorstein holds that, for all their limitations, the initial ideas were of
great value because they began the process of grappling with the prob-
lems, and even a poor hypothesis, Charles Darwin said, is better than
none at all.
This infectious enthusiasm was not limited to questions of econom-
ics. The Rebel Army had quickly gone in for making lms. Che Guevara
opened a military cultural school on January 14, 1959, at the fortress of
La Cabana in Havana, where, until a fortnight earlier, Batista had held
his political prisoners. Armando Acosta, a leader of the Communist Party,
headed the outt and its predominantly young sta included Santiago
Alvarez, Julio Garca Espinosa, and Jos Massip. Garca Espinosa was
put in charge of producing two lms for the Direccin de Cultura (cul-
tural directorate) of the Rebel Army under Camilo Cienfuegos. One of
them, Esta tierra nuestra (This land of ours), which Garca Espinosa
scripted and Toms Gutirrez Alea directed, dealt with the agrarian re-
form and gave an explanation of the legislation to be introduced in May
 120 The Coming of Socialism

and why it was necessary. The other, La vivienda (Housing), was directed
by Garca Espinosa himself, and dealt with urban reform.
Until the agrarian reform law was promulgated, the United States
seemed ready to tolerate the new government, since its rst measures
caused no sharp internal divisions that could be used to try to legitimize
attacks on it, though Washington was wont to launch military invasions
throughout its hinterlandits backyardwith less excuse. The Revo-
lution reduced the price of medicines, telephones, electricity, and rents
below a hundred dollars per month. It introduced measures to root out
corruption from government and business, to suppress gambling (ex-
cept, at this stage, in the luxury hotels and nightclubs), to reform the tax
system. It introduced, say a pair of visitors, prominent North American
Marxists Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, New Dealtype programs in
such elds as education, housing and health. As long as legislation was
conned to such matters as these, no insuperable diculties arose, though
it is clear that friction began to develop quite early between radicals
and conservatives, represented chiey by Fidel on the one side and
Urrutia on the other.5 Urrutia was a judge who had played an honor-
able role at the time of Moncada. When the rebels triumphed, Fidel
placed him in the presidency and waited the short wait until Urrutia
had no alternative but to name him prime minister. Six months later,
Fidel forced him out, by resigning as prime minister in protest against
his vacillation.
The agrarian reform was the turning point because it was the rst
piece of legislation to expropriate North American property. When Fidel
went to Washington and New York in April, before the law was decreed,
he was given, Huberman and Sweezy record, a friendly reception, and
even received a good deal of favorable publicity in the press and on TV.
There were some wary people around too, of course. I had a three hour
conference with Castro when he visited Washington, back in April
1959, wrote Richard Nixon shortly afterward, in his notorious piece of
self-glorication, Six Crises. After that conference, I wrote a conden-
tial memorandum for distribution to the cia, State Department, and
White House. In it I stated atly that I was convinced Castro was either
incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline
and that we would have to treat and deal with him accordingly.6 But,
say Huberman and Sweezy, it was not until after the agrarian reform
 The Coming of Socialism 121

that Fidels stock in government and business circles declined. But now
he was assigned the role of bte noire (or perhaps red devil would be
more accurate), while in Cuba itself, supporters in the upper and middle
classesthe Second Movementbegan to fall away and moved into a
posture of opposition.

Bourgeois they might have been, and only a minority of them already
committed to socialist ideals, but the mood of the countrys artists and
intellectuals was strongly anti-imperialist, and when the Film Institute
was set up by decree at the end of March, it oered those inclined to-
ward cinema an opportunity that had never existed before. The Revolu-
tion, according to Julio Garca Espinosa, represented, initially for every-
one, both rupture and at the same time continuity, even for many who
today are no longer with the Revolution. Everybody felt it was insepara-
ble from their own individual history, and people put themselves at the
service of the moment, which they felt as the source of creativity for the
future.7 The new institutes principal problem was to nd funding. It
needed all sorts of equipment in addition to what it acquired by decree
if it were to function eciently and eectively. But investment was still
controlled by reactionary men sitting in banks that were controlled by
the United States, who resisted them. The government, however, hon-
ored its commitment to the creation of a Cuban cinema as fully as it
could. Fidel and his brother Ral arranged for the rst credits to be
provided from funds controlled by the Agrarian Reform Institute, inra,
and the lms begun by the group at the Rebel Army cultural school passed
with them to icaic for completion. When Che Guevara visited Tokyo
in July 1959 in search of new foreign-trade agreements, he took time to
investigate the purchase of equipment for icaic. A letter he wrote to
icaics chief Alfredo Guevara gives the avor of the timeand also of
Ches inspiring personal intelligence:
Azuba-Prince Hotel
Honmura-cho Minato-ku Tokyo
July 26, 1959
My dear Alfredo,
Hardly had I received your letter than I made contact with a company
through people here and put forward the following proposals: the instal-
lation, by Japan, of a self-sucient studio, with a capacity of three lms
 122 The Coming of Socialism

a month, equipped with all apparatus except cameras, and of a cinema

belonging to the studio seating 2,500, paid for in sugar. I included this
last proposal myself because I consider that the institute should make
itself independent of the cinemas and have its own lm theater. I was
struck by several surprises; rst, all the studios use North American and
German cameras, above all the North American Mitchell. The job of
sending you all the pamphlets Ive given to the ambassador, because its
large and these people work slowly; Im sending you with the envoy a
book that may be of service to you; I dont know its value because I
neither speak English nor understand about cinema. On the concrete
questions you gave me, I can give you the following answers: the Japanese
studios are made for interior lming; they only go outside when theres
no remedy and they calculate a third of the lm in these conditions. Yes,
it is possible to buy plans of the studios, and they oered them to me,
but they havent been back to see me again. Japanese cinema consists
three-fths in modern-day lms with little scenery and low cost ($50,000);
the remaining two-fths use large sets, are generally cinemascope, and
an extremely expensive lm in Japan costs $250,000. According to the
businessmen, they are very interested in the Latin American lm market
but they didnt demonstrate it, since they didnt come back to speak
to us again nor send the catalogs I requested. I indicated to them the
interests of the Film Institute in distributing Japanese lms. I shall try
again before leaving (I depart tomorrow) and will get the embassy to
communicate the results to you ocially. Forgive me the plainness
of this letter but I havent got enough gray matter for psychological
disquisitions; yours, on the other hand, interested me greatly, but the
two pages you dedicated to the analysis of Pedro Luis I can sum up in
three words: hijo de puta.
Recibe un abrazo de tu amigo
Che8

If larger political developments at this time caused no dissension within

icaic, there was nonetheless a growing rivalry between icaic and a
group led by Carlos Franqui, one of the leaders of the July 26th Move-
ment. During the 1950s, Franqui had been prominent in the acionado
lm movement. He belonged to a group that included German Puig,
the future icaic cameraman Ramn Surez, and the writers Edmundo
Desnoes and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which revived the Cinemateca;
and he had made, together with Puig, a short publicity lm (Carta a
una madre [Letter to a mother]). Puig and Desnoes made a short that
was produced and edited by Surez. Surez and Cabrera Infante made a
 The Coming of Socialism 123

lm together about the artist Amelia Pelez that got shown on television.
Surez and Desnoes later worked, respectively, as cinematographer and
writer on Aleas renowned Memorias del subdesarrollo, but all except
Desnoes were to leave Cuba before the end of the 1960sand Desnoes
would leave later.
Franqui was not, however, among Fidels closest followers. In the Sierra,
Franqui had been responsible for Radio Rebelde and the rebel news-
paper Revolucin. When the Revolution took power, he gave up the radio
station and devoted himself fully to the paper, because, he has written,
a newspaper is a good vehicle for ghts and he wanted to start a rev-
olution in Cuban culture.9 He added that, in his eyes, Fidel looked
askance at culture. However, Franqui himself looked askance at the
Communists with whom he had been involved in Nuestro Tiempo
which, himself a member of the party at the time, he had helped to
foundwho were now embarking on the Revolutions rst cultural
undertakings with Fidels support; in the case of Alfredo Guevara, there
was, it seems, considerable personal animosity. Both of them, at a period
during the 1950s when the Communist Party had viewed the July 26th
Movement with suspicion, regarding Fidel as an adventurist, had none-
theless chosen to join. Franqui, in doing so, had gone to the Sierra and
cut his political ties, while Guevara retained his party links and worked
in the underground. According to Guevara, Franqui had developed a
phobia against the party, which I could understand; but it grew to the
extent that when the Revolution took power, he refused to believe that
Fidel was capable of developing socialism in his own way.10 What is
certainly clear from Franquis own writings is that after the overthrow
of the dictator, he saw the Communists exclusively as inltrators into a
Revolution they had done nothing to make. The situation, according to
Alfredo Guevara, was that the evolution of the Revolution toward so-
cialism was for many people a great surprise, which created many anxi-
eties. At the beginning, many people found it easy to be progressive. The
condemnation of corruption, for example, was a matter of national pride:
corruption wasnt Cuban, it was something created by the gringos. That a
process had been set in motion, however, leading toward socialist solu-
tions was something relatively few comprehended, and Franqui took
advantage of the situation, adopting an antagonistic stance toward the
participation of Communists in this process.
 124 The Coming of Socialism

Franqui certainly understood more than many the prime importance

of the mass media, and determined to build a force around Revolucin
that, among other things, would rival the inuence of icaic. In the
random manner in which the process of revolutionary expropriation
distributed its acquisitions, icaic at this time came into possession of a
record factory and an advertising studio, while Revolucin found itself
with a television studio. The young acionado intellectuals of the 1950s
began to divide up. In particular, participants in the urban underground
gravitated toward icaic, though its only criterion for recruits was that
they should not be tainted by association with Batista. Those around
Revolucin, on the other hand, tended to be politically less experienced
and correspondingly more bewildered by the course of events. Ten years
later, Ambrosio Fornet recollected: We had got hold of a terrainthat
of high cultureas a piece of private property in the middle of a revo-
lution that didnt believe in private property.11
Fidel soon curbed the newspapers attacks on the Communists,
whom he clearly regarded critically, but as necessary alliessome, of
course, had always supported him, like Alfredo Guevara and his own
brother, Ral. But the editorship of Revolucinand Franqui knew this
wellremained a key position on the ideological battleeld. By early
1960, printers working in the commercial press were inserting coletillas
tailsin the other papers to protest against their antagonism toward
the Revolution.12 Revolucin, on the other hand, was a paper people
knew they could trust, and Franqui attracted a group of writers, re-
porters, and photographers, some with more experience than others,
whom he knew were hungry for the opportunity to participate.
Many, however, hardly comprehended what was happeningGui-
llermo Cabrera Infante, for example, an old friend of Franquis, who now
edited Revolucins cultural supplement, Lunes de Revolucin. According
to Julio Garca Espinosa, Cabrera was a friend, but he wasnt with us
politically. We called him to become part of the directorate of icaic,
but he chose to remain with Franqui. He was very talented but also very
ingenuous: there were some among the Lunes group who had been asso-
ciated with Batistas director of culture, even if they hadnt been closely
involved. These people he kept company with were lacking in direction,
while icaic set out from the beginning to create a communist political
awareness. This was before Fidel dened the Revolution as socialist, and,
 The Coming of Socialism 125

not surprisingly, icaic soon became the target of attacks. The initial
unity of the artists and intellectuals began to crumble.13

By the end of 1959, icaic had embarked on regular documentary pro-

duction and had completed four lms. Apart from the two already men-
tioned, Garca Espinosa also directed Sexto aniversario (Sixth anniver-
sary), about the half million campesinos invited to Havana to take part
in the sixth-anniversary celebrations of the attack on the Moncada bar-
racks; this was the rst great July 26 demonstration, one of the dates in
the revolutionary calendar on which Fidel, in the years to come, was to
make some of his major speeches. The writer Humberto Arenal, who
went on to make a number of didactic lms, directed the fourth lm, Con-
strucciones rurales (Rural construction) about improvements in condi-
tions for the campesino through the building of houses, schools, and
hospitals.
The tendency in these rst few lms reected the dominant character
of the Rebel Army, its orientation toward the campesino. And it was
enough for these lms to touch this orientation for them to evoke a re-
sponse from the audience that was both demonstrative and emphatic.
The audience at the premiere of Esta tierra nuestra gave the lm a stand-
ing ovation. The following year, Alfredo Guevara wrote that each show-
ing of the lm had the same signicance as a plebiscite. . . . Esta tierra
nuestra released a series of forces and made them explosive.14 Not that
in their style these lms made any special appeal to popular culture,
rural or urban. Neither did they attempt a radical aesthetic, popular or
otherwise. For example, Juan Blancos music for Esta tierra nuestra is
simply a modern orchestral lm score, and, like El Megano before it, the
lm has very much the feel of the classic documentary of social con-
cern. In addition to well-composed if static documentary shots, it in-
cluded enacted scenes, some of them picturing guerrilla warfare. Run-
ning nineteen minutes in black and white, it also uses a conventional
commentary. While the lm has a certain artistry and technical control,
this commentarythe way it addresses its audiencetells us that this
audience is still an amorphous one. Cinema attendance in Cuba in 1959
more than recovered the loss it had seen during 1957 and 1958, and this
conrmed that going to the movies was the dominant form of popular
entertainment; but this had little as yet to do with the eorts of icaic
 126 The Coming of Socialism

and there was very little the new lmmakers could safely assume about
the audience beyond its powerful popular support for the Revolution.
Nor had they sucient experience to begin immediately to experiment.
To be making lms at all was experimental enough, and a dominant
part of the experience of these rst months.
Moreover, they had to contend with the speed of events and the state of
ux they were trying to capture with their cameras. In June 1959, counter-
revolutionary attacks began to take place, with small planes ying in
from Florida and dropping incendiary bombs on cane elds and sugar
mills. In the following months, the country found increasing diculty
in purchasing arms and in March 1960 an explosion occurred in Ha-
vana harbor aboard the Belgian vessel La Coubre, as an arms shipment
was being unloaded, causing dozens of deaths and injuries. The British
prime minister conceded in the House of Commons that the United
States had been exerting international pressure to try and stop the sale
of arms to Cuba. Ten years later, Octavio Cortzar reconstructed the
events in his documentary Sobre un primer combate (On a rst attack),
showing that it could only have been an act of sabotage. The incident
occurred during Sartres visit to Cuba. I discovered, he wrote, the
hidden face of all revolutions, their shaded face: the foreign menace felt
in anguish.15
After the burial of the victims the following day, Castro called for
indissoluble unity. The criminal act of the evening before, said Sartre,
already united the people in rage and in the mobilization of all their
energies:

If, two days before, there still remained in the depths of some soul a little
laxity, a desire to rest, a lazy negligence, or a comfortable optimism, the
aront swept away all those cowardly ideas: one had to ght an implac-
able enemy; one had to win. Castro identied himself with the people,
his sole support; the people at the same time manifested their approba-
tion and intransigence. The aggressor had taken the initiative, but the
counter-blow provoked by his insensibility was the radicalization of the
people through their leaders, and of the leaders through the people
that is to say, the least favored classes. At that moment I understood
that the enemy, because of his tactics, had only accelerated an internal
process which was developing according to its own laws. The Revolution
had adapted itself to the acts of the foreign power; it was inventing its
counter-thrusts. But the very situation of this country which was
strangled for so long, caused its counter-blows to be always more
 The Coming of Socialism 127

radical, conceding more strongly each time to the just demands of the
masses. By trying to crush the Revolution, the enemy allowed it to
convert itself into what it was.16

For the time being, the Revolutionary Government allowed its ideolog-
ical position to remain publicly undened, but its socialist orientation
was an open secret among groups like icaic, and a threatening rumor
among the nationalist bourgeoisie. What is at rst suprising, Sartre
wrote in Lunes

especially if one has visited the countries of the Eastis the apparent
absence of ideology. Ideologies, however, are not what this century
lacks; right here they have representatives who are oering their services
from all sides. Cuban leaders do not ignore them. They simply do not
make use of them. Their adversaries formulate the most contradictory
reproaches. For some of them, this absence of ideas is only a deception;
it hides a rigorous Marxism which does not yet dare to reveal its name:
some day the Cubans will take o their mask and Communism will
be implanted in the Caribbean, just a few miles from Miami. Other
enemiesor, at times, the same onesaccuse them of not thinking at
all: They are improvising, I have been told, and then after having done
something they make up a theory. Some politely add, Try to speak to
the members of the government; perhaps they know what they are
doing. Because as far as we are concerned, I must confess that we know
absolutely nothing at all. And a few days ago at the University, a stu-
dent declared, To the extent that the Revolution has not dened its
objectives, autonomy becomes all the more indispensable to us.17

This was the attitude among many artists and intellectuals. They enter-
tained great concern for their own personal freedom, although nothing
was threatening them. On the contrary, as Ambrosio Fornet later de-
scribed it, here was a situation in which if no one could guarantee that
the artists and intellectuals were revolutionaries, neither could anyone
say that they werent, except for a quartet of night-prowling tomcats
who still confused jazz with imperialism and abstract art with the
devil.18 There was, he said, a tacit agreement with the intellectuals that
was later to cause problems, that allowed them to paint, exhibit, and
write as they wished, disseminate their aesthetic preoccupations and
polemicize with whom they wished, as long as they didnt step outside
their own territory. It was, of course, a contradictory situation, because
it implied that they should not become too politicized. Indeed, it was
said in some circles that the best cultural policy was not to have one.
 128 The Coming of Socialism

But this allowed many artists outside such groupings as icaic to get
cut o, forcing them to follow the course of political development some-
what in isolation, a condition that resulted in a very uneven develop-
ment of consciousness among them.

A Soviet mission arrived in Cuba in February 1960, and trade and credit
agreements were signed within a few days; similar agreements with other
socialist countries followed. In April, Cuba began to purchase crude oil
from the ussr under the February agreements, enabling it to save for-
eign exchange. But Cubas U.S.-owned reneries refused to process Soviet
crude and, in the last few days of June, before a serious shortage could
develop, the government took them over. Within days, President Eisen-
hower announced the inevitable and expected retaliation: cancellation
of Cubas sugar quota. Khrushchev immediately declared his support
for Cuba and the Soviet Union undertook the purchase of the canceled
quota.
The cia had by this time already begun to deliver weapons and radio
transmitters to anti-Castro agents, who, according to two U.S. journal-
ists quoted by Boorstein, all . . . had contact with the American embassy
in Havana . . . the cia and the United States government had thus rmly
entered the conspiracy to oust Castro.19 In this atmosphere, and demon-
strating the principle described by Sartre as making the counterblows
against the enemy always more radical, Fidel announced at the begin-
ning of August the nationalization of key North American properties in
Cuba: thirty-six sugar mills and their lands, the electric and telephone
companies, and the reneries and other oil properties that had already
been requisitioned. In September, Cuban branches of U.S. banks were
nationalized, and the following month nationalization was extended to
practically all other large or medium-sized industrial, commercial, and
nancial enterprises, railroads, port facilities, hotels, and cinemas. Na-
tionalization of the major lm distribution companies followed in May
1961. Three remaining smaller distributors were nationalized at the be-
ginning of 1965 and the stocks of these companies, which could not be
legally shown, were thereby taken over.20
As the nationalizations proceeded, however, and the disaected con-
tinued to leave, trained personnel became scarcer and scarcer. Enrique
Pineda Barnet, who later joined icaic and directed an experimental
feature-length documentary, David, in 1967, chanced to be the rst per-
 The Coming of Socialism 129

son to respond to a call by Fidel during a TV broadcast for volunteers to

serve as teachers in the Sierra Maestrabecause he lived close to the
TV studio and was only waiting like so many others for such an oppor-
tunity. When the nationalizations came about some months later, Fidel
picked eighty-two of the volunteer teachers, and they were asked to be
ready to move in overnight as the new managers. Pineda Barnet found
himself in charge of a sugar renery. Recalling these events, he remarked
that he not only in this way came into proper contact with workers for
the rst time, but he also learned a good deal about the ousted sugar
bosses. He even discovered a hidden cache of soft-core porno movies.21
A new organism was now set up, the Bank of Foreign Commerce, to
function as a government foreign-trade agency, with instructions to im-
port large quantities of goods as rapidly as possible in order to reduce
the impact of the embargo by the United States, which the Cubans now
anticipated. icaic was thus able to acquire several crucial pieces of
equipment: a Mitchell camera, an optical camera (for special-eects
work), an animation table, and laboratory equipment, all from the United
States. The animation table enabled it to set up a cartoon section, staed
by Jess de Armas, Eduardo Muoz, and the Australian Harry Reede, a
Cuban resident, and the rst two cartoons were completed before the
end of the year. Each lasting four minutes and directed by de Armas,
El man (Manna) is a moral tale about a campesino who believes every-
thing falls from the heavens like manna and ends up with nothing be-
cause his neighbors take it all; La prensa seria (The serious press) deals
with misrepresentation by the supposedly serious newspapers.
The documentaries made during 1960 fall into three groups. The rst
comprises didactic lms aimed mainly at the campesino, dealing with
agricultural methods (lms on the cultivation of rice, tobacco, and the
tomato), the dangers of negligence in handling drinking water, or the
advantages of the cooperatives and schools and other facilities estab-
lished by the Revolutionary Government. The second group is made
up of lms recording the principal mass mobilizations of the year. The
third group is more diverse. It includes lms that record various other
aspects of the revolutionary process or that deal with aspects of Cubas
social and cultural history. Manets El negro is a short history of racial
discrimination in Cuba from the time of slavery to the triumph of the
Revolution and its prohibition (another of the Revolutions rst mea-
sures). Grados Playas del pueblo (The peoples beaches) celebrates the
 130 The Coming of Socialism

opening up of the islands private beaches. Nstor Almendros made

Ritmo de Cuba (Rhythm of Cuba) on Afro-Cuban folk music (and also,
in his spare time, using, as he himself admits in his autobiography, lm
short ends that he lched from icaic, Gente en la playa [People at the
beach]).22 Some of these lms are more personal than others, but for the
most part the subjects and themes of the lms in all three groups were
chosen according to the needs of ideological struggle in the revolution-
ary situation. Historians of the Revolution would do well to watch these
lms carefully: they serve as an excellent guide to what many, if not all,
of these issues were, and at the same time indicate the lines that were
being drawn at each moment for the next phase; for since lms take
time to make, they are also evidence of how closely the leadership at
icaic was integrated from the outset with thinking at the center of
gravity within the revolutionary leadership.
Ugo Ulive, the Uruguayan lmmaker who worked at icaic during its
early years, singles out Manets lm as the only worthy thing accom-
plished by the Franco-Cuban writer during his stay in Cuba, also men-
tioning a lm by the Puerto Rican scar Torres (who, like Alea and
Garca Espinosa, had studied at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome)
called Tierra olvidada (Forgotten land), a kind of El Megano revisited.
The Zapata swamp is being transformed: the Revolution has come to
the swamp and the wretched lives of the charcoal burners are undergo-
ing a complete transformation. Torres, without doubt one of the more
promising directors of this initial stage, undertakes to express the
change with a style that fearlessly blends a certain gratuitous grandilo-
quence with an occasionally moving epic scope. . . . In the culminating
sequence, [he] juxtaposes the invasion of machinery that has come
to dredge the swamp with a peasant woman giving birth in a nearby
hut. The absence of false didence with which Torres accomplishes a
sequence so full of traps as this is without doubt the mark of a director
who could have been very important in the later development of
icaic.23 The lm won second prize at the Festival of the Peoples in
Florence, and an honorable mention at the Leipzig Film Festival, both
in 1960two out of ve international awards achieved by Cuban lms
that year, the year in which (with one exception) they made their rst
international appearance. Torres went on to direct a feature lm for
icaic, Realengo 18 (Plot 18), a year or two later and then returned to
Puerto Rico, where he died young.
 The Coming of Socialism 131

These foreign awards were hugely important to icaic, for inter-

national recognition of this kind vindicated the somewhat crazy project
of creating a lm industry and provided an answer to critics; moreover,
they helped the promotion of the image of the Revolution abroad. Not
that they were made with an eye to foreign approval. On the contrary,
the guiding principle was that foreign recognition would follow, where
it will, if the lms were authentic expressions of the Revolutions own
needs.
The other two lms to win international distinctions in 1960 were
Aleas Esta tierra nuestra and Garca Espinosas La vivienda. The follow-
ing year, there were collective awards for Cuban lms at two German
lm festivals, Leipzig in the east and Oberhausen in the west. Four lms
were included: the lm by Torres; Aleas Asamblea general (General
Assembly), recording the mass meeting of September 2, 1960, at which
the rst Declaration of Havana was proclaimed; and two lms by Jos
Massip, Los tiempos del joven Mart (The Times of the Young Mart) and
Por qu naci el Ejrcito Rebelde (Why the Rebel Army Was Born). The
second of the Massip pair uses nonprofessional actors and runs eighteen
minutes (the years longest documentary, Garca Espinosas Un ao de
libertad [A year of freedom], runs twenty-seven minutes). In terms of
narrative, wrote Alfredo Guevara, Massip found very simple solutions.
He decomposes reality in order to recompose it in a succession of fres-
coes, some of which oer the greatest clarity.24 But although the lm
was structurally uneven, he said, it was undeniably eective because of
the power of the theme and the sincerity with which it was treated.
The criticism is interesting because it indicates something of the values
that icaic was trying to develop. At the top of the list is judgment in
the choice of subject matter, together with that elusive quality, sincerity.
It was to give these criteria body, so to speak, that an understanding of
formal aesthetic procedures was encouraged. Aesthetic experiment was
felt to be thoroughly desirable, but not formalist preoccupation.
The rst of Massips lms incorporates a score by Harold Gramatges,
who had been president of Nuestro Tiempo and was now serving as a
kind traveling ambassador based in Paris. Like Aleas La toma de la
Habana por los ingleses (The Taking of Havana by the Englishan event
that occurred in 1762), this lm originated before the Revolution. Using
paintings, period engravings, even magazine illustrations to describe
the period of Marts youth, Massip had started making it in 1956. He was
 132 The Coming of Socialism

able to complete it during icaics rst months, and in July 1959 Hctor
Garca Mesa took it to the World Youth Festival in Vienna, where it be-
came the rst lm of the Cuban Revolution to be seen internationally. It
has the distinction of being also the rst lm seriously and sensitively to
tackle the recovery (el rescate) of Cuban nineteenth-century political
history, a theme that was to be given great prominence in icaics future
output.

By the end of 1960, a number of diculties had begun to appear in the

countrys economic condition. Edward Boorstein later wrote:

The management of the Cuban economy during the rst two years of
the Revolution was made easier than usual by the existence of a large
amount of reservesusing this word in the broad sense given to it by
economists in the socialist countries. There were unutilized resources:
idle land and labor and unutilized capacity in the manufacturing plants
and the construction industry. There were some dollar holdings. There
were over ve million head of cattle. . . . The rapid progress of the Cuban
economy in the early years after the Revolution took power was made
possible by the reserves. The very irrationality of the prerevolutionary
economy served as a springboard for advance. . . . The reserves cushioned
the Cuban economy against the consequences of error. . . . The real cost
to the economy of using resources that would otherwise be left idle is
zeronot the costs that appear in the conventional accounting ledgers.
When you raised the demands on resources to a higher level than the
supply, the rst consequences were not diculties in the economy, but
reductions in reserves.25

This was the stage that had been reached by the end of the year. Dol-
lar expenditure was running three times as high as dollar earnings; if
the decit continued, it would wipe out the dollar reserves in about
four months.
Though mistakes had been made, this situation was less a conse-
quence of mismanagement than of the very policies of the Revolution:
on the one hand, of raising the peoples purchasing power, on the other,
of buying in foreign goods against the likelihood of further U.S. retalia-
tion. By spring 1961, the rst shortages began to make themselves felt
and the question inevitably arises of the extent to which the troubles
that now occurred in the eld of cultural politics were a consequence of
the unequal development of political consciousness among the intellec-
tual community, and hence among many of them a lack of preparedness
 The Coming of Socialism 133

for the likely developments of the Revolutions third year, which began
with the United States breaking o diplomatic relations on January 3.
We knew, says Alfredo Guevara, through our intelligence services,
that we were going to be invaded. So there were the mobilizations of the
people, the creation of the militia, the military training, the civil defense.
In this heroic climate there appeared a lm that did not reect any of
this. It showed the Havana of the lower depths, the drunks, the small
cabarets where prostitution was still going on, where there was still drug
tracking, something like the world of On the Bowery. (On the Bowery
follows the ups and downs of an alcoholic through the bars, ophouses,
and shelters of New York; it was made in 1956 by Lionel Rogosin and is
celebrated as an early example of the new documentary.) Similarly, P.M.,
in only fteen minutes, showed a world inhabited by the mainly black
and mulatto lumpenproletariat. Obviously it wasnt made out of any
feeling of racial discrimination, but the presentation of these images at
this time was nonetheless questionable.26 In short, it presented black
people in roles associated with the state of oppression from which they
were in process of liberation.
The lm was made by the painter Saba Cabrera Infante, brother of
Guillermo (editor of Lunes de Revolucin) with Orlando Jimnez Leal as
cinematographer, and it became a cause clbre of the liberals of the
Lunes group when it was banned from public exhibition at the end of
May. The signicance of the moment is crucial to what happened. The
incident took place six weeks after the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, when
U.S.-backed mercenaries were routed in the space of three days by the
Rebel Army backed by the Peoples Militia. Not only that. The day
before the invasion, at a mass rally called to protest a surprise simul-
taneous air attack on three Cuban cities, and in the knowledge that a
cia-sponsored invasion was on its way, Fidel publicly declared for the
rst time the socialist character of the Revolution. Not that this was
exactly unexpected. Fidel has explained that this avowal had been antic-
ipated by the masses and he was only acknowledging an already over-
whelming mass sentiment. But the timing is signicant. It is inconceivable
that at a moment when the Revolution was in mortal danger Fidel would
have taken this stand unless he knew it corresponded with popular con-
viction.27 Indeed, it was precisely in this knowledge that Fidel chose the
moment: in order to redouble the energy with which the invaders would
be met. Perhaps P.M. was only a mildly oensive lm, but in the euphoria
 134 The Coming of Socialism

that followed the defeat of the mercenaries the mood of the country was
bound to make it seem worse. Alfredo Guevara admits, I reacted to the
lm as an oended revolutionary. Today I would manage a thing like
that better.
Several accounts of the aair have been published. One is Ugo Ulives
in the article already cited. Another is by a British travel writer, Nicholas
Wollaston, in a dreadful (though engrossing) book called Red Rumba,
about his visit to Cuba in the early 1960s.28 More recently, there is a sort
of version from exile, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the lmmakers
brother.29 As a writer, Cabrera Infante is a kind of literary Ken Russell,
the epitome of bad taste, and his article bends under the weight of so
many base, bombastic, and bloated puns that it becomes a worm-eaten
piece of ction with about as much relationship to what occurred as
Russells horric lms on Tchaikovsky and Mahler to the real biography
of those composers. The Cuban poet Pedro Prez Sarduy, a culturally
hungry student of literature at the University of Havana in the days
when all this happened, has commented bluntly that Cabrera Infante
was one of those writers who never did know what happened, a mem-
ber of an incongruous cultural elite unable to grasp the real meaning
of change.30 Combining and adjudging these accounts, and from con-
versations in Cuba, what seems to have happened was this:
P.M. was a modest lm, which was shotas everyone agrees, but
thats about all they agree onin a free cinema style. It begins with a
ferry slipping into Havana harbor from across the water. The camera
then wanders into a number of crowded bars in the narrow streets
behind the waterfront, where it shows people (Wollaston:) drinking,
arguing, loving, quarrelling, dreaming. . . . It falls on ecstasy and des-
peration, it peers blearily through the cigar smoke, singles out a glass of
beer, lights for a moment on a smile, winces at a bright electric bulb
[someone should tell Wollaston cameras dont wince], hovers over a
shelf of bottles. A blurred negress stands in front of the lens, and the
camera moves back to take in the whole jostling, sweating scene . . . the
only sound is the roar of so many Cuban voices, the clink of glasses
and ice from the bar, and the music. In the whole lm there is not a sin-
gle coherent word spoken. In the end, the exhausted revelers return
whence they came.
Guillermo gave his brother money to complete the lm, which was
spent on laboratory facilities at the TV channel run by Revolucin. Nei-
 The Coming of Socialism 135

ther Alfredo Guevara nor Julio Garca Espinosa could remember having
seen it on television, but it was noticed by Nstor Almendros, who, hav-
ing left icaic, now had a lm column in the independent cultural weekly
Bohemia. There he praised the lm as enormously poetic and a verita-
ble jewel of experimental cinema. Wollaston considers it understandable
that he should have been enthusiastic and may be excused for not having
mentioned that it was amateurish [and] that much of the photography
was not half as good as that of his own lms. But encouraged, the lm-
makers oered it to the manager of one of Havanas remaining privately
owned cinemas, who told them he liked it but they would need an exhi-
bition license from icaic. Assuming that this was just a formality, says
Wollaston, they were taken aback when the lm was conscated.
But it was the Institute that was taken by surprise, since no one there
knew anything about it. The response was hostile. The lm was seen, as
Prez Sarduy puts it, as irresponsible both to the Revolution and the
cultural tasks of those privileged to have the costly medium of cinema
at their disposal. icaic decided that its distribution should be delayed.
It did not expect the explosion that took place. Cabrera Infante, always
enamored, says Prez Sarduy, of the tawdriest Hollywood movies, writes,
We had been expecting a showdown with the Film Institute. It was to
become a shoot-out. Guillermo, said Alfredo Guevara, came to argue
with me, and left crying that this was Stalinism and fascism. Almendros
used his inuence to rally support for the oending lmmakers. icaic
decided to arrange a meeting where the lm would be shown and dis-
cussed. It was held at the Casa de las Amricas, the revolutionary liter-
ary institute, and therefore more Luness territory than icaics. Accord-
ing to Wollaston, the audience supported the lm as at best a piece of
original artistic work and at worst an amateurish documentary that
was politically naive. He also reports that someone had gone down to
the waterfront and done a survey, and found that the people in the lm
all supported the Revolution and some were even milicianos (militia
members), so how could the lm be counterrevolutionary?
For icaic, howeveronly this is something beyond Wollastons ken
the issue was both more complicated and more serious. People at icaic
felt the lm failed to register what was really in the air because it fol-
lowed its chosen stylistic model both too closely and too uncritically.
This was not just politically but also aesthetically irresponsible. At icaic
they had begun to sense that the camera was not the unproblematic
 136 The Coming of Socialism

kind of instrument the apologists for P.M. supposed, rst of all because
of the way they had to struggle in their lms to keep abreast with the
pace of revolutionary change. To paraphrase the French lm theorist
Serge Daney, it does not involve a single straight line from the real to
the visible and thence to its reproduction on lm in which a simple
truth is faithfully represented. Daney says, in a world where I see is
automatically said for I understand, such a fantasy has probably not
come about by chance. The dominant ideology that equates the real
with the visible has every interest in encouraging it.31 At icaic they
were beginning to perceive that revolutionary change required a rupture
with this equation, which meant, among other things being constantly
on guard against received aesthetic formulas. The impression P.M. must
have created at icaic was of a lm that segmented social reality and
evaded recognition that the screen belonged to the same reality as the
scenes it portrayed, which thus indicted the lm through its very absence.
For their part, the Lunes group (according to Wollaston) accused icaic
of making dreary socialist-realist stu about milicianos and alfabeti-
zadores [literacy teachers] that would convince nobody who was not al-
ready convinced. Even more cynically, it allowed the importation of
terrible Hollywood trash, Westerns and British epics about battling on
the North-East Frontier that portrayed imperialists as heroes and Indi-
ans as worse than animalsa far cry from the ideals of the Cuban Rev-
olution. Even some of the Russian and Polish lms that were shown in
Cuba were freer, more individualistic and subjective than P.M.; only the
Chinese lms were as dreary as the Institutesand as Almendros said,
who wanted to make lms like the Chinese?
There is never, on the part of the liberal apologists, any mention
of the real problems of distribution that icaic faced. icaic, however,
twice during this period conducted market investigations, and Alfredo
Guevara reported their ndings in Cine Cubano:

During 1959, for example, 484 lms were exhibited in Cuba, of which
266 were North American, 44 English, 24 French, 25 Italian, 2 Polish,
1 Brazilian, 1 Swedish, 8 Argentinian, 19 Spanish, 3 Japanese, 3 German,
79 Mexican, and 1 Soviet. The remaining 8 were Cuban, coproductions
or lms made in Cuba in previous years and premiered or exhibited
during 1959.
As can be seen, the bulk of exhibition remained in Hollywood hands
and lm industries under its inuence. . . .
 The Coming of Socialism 137

More serious, however, is the character of the lms that are shown.
Out of the 484 lms, 140 presented sentimental dramas and conicts,
generally of the quality of syrup and magazine serials, sometimes
psychological in a visually spectacular way; 34 were war movies and
27 police, 43 westerns, and 92 action and adventure. . . . Average taste
has been maltreated and certain overriding inuences have created
habits of cinema dicult to eradicate . . . the genres together with
the star system predominate and their formulas amount to anticinema.32

The same displacement of cultural values, he continued, could be

found in other media. The publishing market, for example, had its genres
too: detective novels, which intellectuals delighted in; the novela rosa
(pink novels) preferred by solitary ladies and leisured young seoritas;
comics; and action novels full of Italian gangsters, Russian spies, African
savages, Latin American adventurists, and treacherous Asiatics, and
always, as the heroes, North Americans.
In the face of this culture of depravity, Guevara argued, the cinema
needed new criteria, but they had to be realistically related to the condi-
tions to be found among the audience. The public, he said, was divided
between the popular and the exclusive. At one extreme lay the campesino
masses, at the other, the extrarened bourgeois minorities. One was
denied access to national culture and the other became estranged, indif-
ferent, or antagonistic. But the Revolution had not only liberated
campesinos and workers, he said, it had also liberated culture and the
artists and intellectuals, liberated them from the prison of an exclusive
and narrow public that was maimed and deformed in its taste, and
from which it had sought escape in a search for eccentric originality
and the repetition of all that was uttered in the great capitals of art.
And indeed, the Lunes group, according to Ulive, was like a clan with its
own enshrined idols and an excessive urge to be up to date and if pos-
sible even ahead of the moment; as another commentator put it, a bit
too exclusively preoccupied with beat poetry and the nouveau roman.33
The divorce, says Prez Sarduy, between them and their society had fos-
tered a hypercritical attitude and a nonconformist intellectual rebellious-
ness with few roots in social reality. They were like the embodiment of
the antihero of their hero Sartrebut lacking Sartres perception. Typ-
ically unsure of their social position, too fearful to rise up yet too lucid
to accept unreservedly the prevailing state of aairs, they judged their
epoch while remaining outside it. Finding little outlet in the precarious
 138 The Coming of Socialism

and coercive world of publishing and the media under Batista, they had
taken refuge in the caf talk, cynicism, and satire of the dclass intel-
lectual, both spurned and nauseated by society. They did not see, when
the Revolution came, what Sartre saw when he came to look at it, that
this self-image of the intellectual is subverted by revolutionthat it
became, one might add, like the pterodactyl, which ew once, but was
then condemned to extinction.
icaic, faced with disagreement at the Casa de las Amricas meeting,
proposed that P.M. be shown to an ordinary audience made up of as-
sorted members of the revolutionary organizations, since that is what
the supporters of the lm argued that the people in it were. This, of
course, annoyed the lmmakers even more; who asked, says Wollaston,
what trade unionists or women knew about lms. (One of the mass
organizations was the Federation of Cuban Women.) Obviously, it said,
such people would produce the verdict expected of them; and they went
away to sulk and scheme again. icaic made a copy of the lm for its
archive and returned the original to the lmmakers with permission
for public screening denied. (They showed it to Wollaston after all these
events had taken place, privately, without legal oense, but in an atmo-
sphere calculated to reinforce his own paranoiac suspicions.)
Rather than call this the Revolutions rst act of lm censorship, it is
more enlightening to see it as the denouement of the incipient conict
between dierent political trends that lay beneath the surface during
the period of the acionado movement in the 1950s. The conict brought
the whole cultural sector to a boiling point, and clearly it was only re-
solvable through the intervention of the Revolutions maximum leader.
A series of meetings was called that took place in the National Library
on June 16, 23, and 30, 1961, with the participation of practically the
whole intellectual and artistic community. Fidel and other revolution-
ary leaders attended, and his closing speech has become known as the
Words to the Intellectuals.34 Although he had not seen the lm him-
self, he approved the decision not to show it, for it was a question of
upholding the right of a government body to exercise its function. But
this was the least of what he had to say.
Carlos Franquis account of these meetings is not a trustworthy mem-
oir: it is scarred by general paranoia, and a marked personal hatred of
Alfredo Guevara.35 There is no denying that the meetings were highly
charged, but Franquis graphic picture of manipulation by a communist
 The Coming of Socialism 139

clique just does not square with a proper reading of the speech. Fidel
began by apologizing for not attending to the issue sooner. Then, he iden-
tied the question at issue as fundamentally concerning the problem of
freedom for artistic creation. Distinguished visitors to Cuba, he said, in-
cluding Sartre and the North American sociologist C. Wright Mills, had
raised the question and he didnt doubt its importance. But the Cuban
Revolution had been made in record time, it had not had time to hold its
Yenan Conference, and accordingly he had a lot to learn himself; he did
not presume to know more than others. Listening to the discussion, how-
ever, he had sometimes had the impression of dreaming a little because
it seemed there were people there who thought the Revolution was over,
it had won, and now it was going to asphyxiate them. He wanted to as-
sure people that this fear was unfounded, the Revolution defended free-
dom, it had brought the country a very large sum of freedoms.
Then he went straight to the point. Everyone, he said, was in evident
agreement in respecting freedom of form: I believe there is no doubt
about this problem. But over the question of content there were people
who feared prohibitions, regulations, limitations, rules, and authorities.
What could be the reason for this worry? It can only worry someone, he
said, who lacks condence in his own art, who lacks condence in his
real capacity to create. And one can ask oneself if a true revolutionary, if
an artist or intellectual who feels the Revolution and is condent that
he is capable of serving the Revolution, can put this problem to himself;
that is to say, if there is room for doubt on the part of the truly revolu-
tionary writers and artists. I think not; the area of doubt exists for writ-
ers and artists who without being counter-revolutionaries do not feel
themselves to be revolutionaries either. (Applause.)
A remarkable formulation, politically impeccable because it outma-
neuvered not only the liberals but also the revolutionary sectarians, the
night-prowling tomcats mentioned by Fornet who still confused ab-
stract art with the devil. This position of Fidels was also icaics. It also
has an antecedent in the ideas of the manifesto Towards a Free Revolu-
tionary Art, published in 1938 over the signatures of Diego Rivera and
Andr Breton, which Trotsky had a hand in drafting: True art is unable
not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical recon-
struction of society.
It was correct, said Fidel, for artists who were neither revolutionary
nor counterrevolutionary to feel the Revolution as a problem. Only the
 140 The Coming of Socialism

dishonest and the mercenary found no problem in it and knew where

their interests lay. But people who sincerely held a distinct philosophy
from the Revolution, like proper Catholics, the Revolution had to respect.
Its attitude toward them should be the same that it adopted toward all
honest people who were not enemies of the Revolution. Thus he ar-
rived at the much-repeated formula: dentro de la Revolucin todo;
contra la Revolucin, nada (within the Revolution, everything; against
it, nothing).
At the same time, Fidel defended the Consejo Nacional de Cultura
(cncNational Council of Culture), from which icaic was also under
attack but from the left, for the cnc represented the old guard of the
Communist Party whom the Young Communists of icaic had criticized
during the Batista years. Partly addressing these Young Communists
his own comrades and contemporaries who had the unfortunate expe-
rience of having to exercise a cultural authority they did not believe
ought to existFidel said: The existence of an authority in the cul-
tural eld doesnt mean there is any reason to worry about the abuse of
this authority, because who is it that hopes this cultural authority should
not exist? By the same count one could hope the Militia would not exist
and not even the State itself, and if anyone is concerned so much that
there should not exist the smallest state authority, well, theres no need
to worry, have patience, the day will come when the State too will not
exist. (Applause.)
The aim of the Revolution, said Fidel, was to develop culture into the
true heritage of the people; it was a struggle to create the conditions to
be able to do this, but that was the cncs job, just as it was also the job
of other bodies the Revolution had created, like the Imprenta Nacional
(national printing house) and icaic itself. Individuals had the respon-
sibility to integrate themselves within these bodies. He did not want to
propose any general rules about this: not all artistic production was of the
same nature. But to do this couldnt possibly contradict anyones artistic
aspirations, as long as you suppose, said Fidel, that artists are trying to
create for their own contemporaries. There can be no artists, he said, who
just go around thinking about posterity, because, in that case, without
considering our judgment infallible, I think that whoever holds to this
is a victim of self-delusion. (Applause.) The same with the Revolution
itself. We are not making it, he said, for the generations to come, but for
now. Who would follow us otherwise? As for posterity, how would pos-
 The Coming of Socialism 141

terity judge the artist who lived through this epoch but remained out-
side it, did not form part of it, and did not express it?
Alluding to Lunes itself, Fidel allowed the need for a cultural maga-
zine, but not that it should be in the hands of one particular group.
Only one more issue of Lunes appeared. But arising from the discus-
sions at these meetings, a new organization was created, the Unin de
Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (uneacUnion of Cuban Writers and
Artists). This was to be a professional-interests body rather than a trade
union, and one of its rst functions was to publish a journal, La Gaceta
de Cuba, in which future cultural debates were to take place.

The confrontation over P.M. represents the most visible moment in the
process of ideological rupture (desgarramiento) of which revolution-
ary intellectuals all over Latin America have spoken, the famous rup-
tures we intellectuals are so addicted to, as the Cuban poet and essayist
Roberto Fernndez Retamar once put it with aectionate irony.36 The
rupture is an ideological conict, a conict of growth, which produces
a crisis of self-condence, but may be resolved in a sudden spurt of con-
cientizacinan untranslatable word: it derives from conciencia, which
means both conscience and consciousness; hence, more or less,
conscience-stricken growth in consciousness or awareness.
The philosophy behind this concept has been lucidly developed by
the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire. The rupture to which the artist
or intellectual is subjected in the course of the revolutionary process is
the seed of his or her translation from one social function to another,
from the habits acquired under the regime of bourgeois values, through
rejecting and refusing the political impotence these values imply, to a
new self-image as a cultural worker. The rupture has many aspects. In
the words of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton:
In every rupture we intellectuals are accustomed to see rst an ideological
problem and then, always as a result of this, moral and sentimental prob-
lems. These resulting problems can only be resolved through the solu-
tion of the fundamental ideological conict. In this sense, revolution is
a constant challenge: its uninterrupted advance makes simple overall
acceptance of its latest and most general principles insucient, but
requires permanent incorporation of its totalizing practice.37

The process brings on a crisis of individualism, which the whole

weight of bourgeois ideology pushes the artist to defend; after all, the
 142 The Coming of Socialism

bourgeois myth of the artist was created around it. When this happens,
those who resist the challenge are reduced to such things as making
personal attacks against the conduct of those who respond to it. This is
when they begin to make wild accusations of Stalinism and fascism.
Here, in Daltons discourse, the key formulationincorporation of a
totalizing practicecorresponds to the concept of revolution within
the revolutionnot so much Trotskys, however, as the version that
Rgis Debray developed around the ideas and example of Che Guevara.
But let the nal word on the subject go to Julio Garca Espinosa:
Lunes de Revolucin . . . did not present itself as a simple alternative. It is
undeniable that it . . . did not represent a socialist option . . . it is equally
undeniable that one should not underestimate the individual talents of
some of its members, and not out of unbridled admiration for artistic
talent but from the rm conviction that here too was something that
could contribute in some way to the the development of the Revolution.
How should one struggle, then, against an opposition that at the same
time should be regarded as an ally? What solution could there be? Could
we think in terms of the traditional united front? But the experience
wed had of frontism was that it had been limited to bringing artists and
intellectuals with an openly progressive attitude together, granted only
an extremely wide and generous meaning to the concept. Besides, revo-
lutionary artist and party artist had hardly ever meant the same thing.
One could say that the only dierence between a progressive artist and a
party artist had been that the latter was more committed to essential
party tasks and worked with more discipline at the immediate political
objectives that the party dened. The dierence was not owing to a more
revolutionary concept of art. (And of life?) When the concept of socialist
realism was raised, everyone broke out in uproar. If the united front,
enmeshed in such ambiguities, was questionable under capitalism, what
role could it play with a Revolution in power? Was the union of all
revolutionary forces clearly and simply the unication of all progressive
artists and intellectuals? The union of all revolutionary forces, yes, but
under the direction of the Revolutions most advanced force. And among
the progressive artists and intellectuals, who, at that moment, represented
the most advanced current? The cnc, icaic, or Lunes de Revolucin? If
it is dicult to give a denite reply, politically we realized it was icaic,
and fought against the tendency represented by Lunes, which was not
directing itself toward socialism. Socialism, which in reality the Revo-
lution had begun to dene. The climax to the situation was produced
by the Revolution itself. It did not deny Lunes members the right to
continue as participants within the Revolution, but took away their
 The Coming of Socialism 143

opportunity of exercising cultural hegemony. The Revolution in this way

established better conditions for dierent artistic tendencies to engage
with each other on more equal terms. This was a correct, a revolutionary
solution.38

With Lunes disbanded, the conditions ripened for the next episode of
the cultural struggle, the struggle against sectarianism.
 CHAPTER SEVEN
The First Feature Films

It was in 1960 that icaic made its rst feature lms. The rst to be
shown, at the end of the year, though it was completed second, was His-
torias de la Revolucin (Stories of the Revolution), a lm made up of
three episodes directed by Toms Gutirrez Alea. Originally, it was
intended to comprise four episodes, two by Alea and two by a director
born in Spain and living in Mexico, Jos Miguel Garca Ascot, all four
photographed by the Italian neorealist cinematographer Otello Martelli;
Martellis camera operator was the son of another leading Italian neo-
realist, Cesare Zavattini. Garca Ascots episodes were later incorporated
into another three-episode lm, Cuba 58, released in 1962 with a nal
episode directed by Jorge Fraga, while Alea directed a third episode for
the original lm.
The rst lm to be completed by icaic had in fact been Julio Garca
Espinosas Cuba baila (Cuba dances). But Cuba baila had as its subject
the prerevolutionary world of the middle bourgeoisie and it was felt
that icaic should make its feature debut with a lm about the revolu-
tionary struggle itself. The three episodes of Historias . . . are El herido
(The wounded man), Rebeldes (Rebels), and La batalla de Santa Clara
(The battle of Santa Clara). These three stories, wrote Eduardo Heras
Len ten years later, oered the audience the chance of identifying with
three key moments in the revolutionary struggle: the assault on the
presidential palace mounted by the urban revolutionary group Directorio
Revolucionario on March 13, 1957; the struggle of the guerrillas in the
Sierra; and the nal battle for liberation. However fragmentary the treat-

144
 The First Feature Films 145

ment, he said, the subjects themselves were enough to engage the audi-
ence. We didnt think much at that time about the technique, about the
shots, or the direction of the actors: that was secondary since the lm
reected a truth, a living reality for all of us. We were anxious to relive
the history that many of us had not been able to help makeHeras
Len was eighteen years old when the lm was rst shownto allow
the imagination fully to run its course and momentarily depersonalize
us by recovering life on celluloid. In a word, he continued,

we wanted to feel heroes ourselves in some wayat least for an hour

and a halfin order to satisfy our appetite for heroism and courage. . . .
And naturally we were the wounded man in the rst story, beaten but
not defeated, as Hemingway said, and we were hurt terribly by the shot
in the young rebels leg during the assault on the palace, and suered
with him while searching for somewhere to hide ourselves; and we began
to hate the petit bourgeois full of fear who ran away like a coward in
order not to get involved. We felt not even a hint of sympathy for him,
not even after he tried to change his attitude. Nor did we feel it was a
pity when, victim of his own contradictions and fears, he fell into the
hands of the police. We said, The coward asked for it, and that was
enough for us. It didnt interest us that the actors were a little articial
(sad reality about our lm actors), that the characters were schematic . . .
that the director was clumsy in his use of the interior sets, and that, above
all, the episode was lacking in what [Alejo] Carpentier calls contexts. . . .
We were only interested in the hero and qualities of sacrice; contexts
merely rounded the story o.1

In the second storywhich Alea based on an anecdote recounted to

him by Che Guevarathey became the guerrillas in the Sierra. They
decided not to abandon their wounded comrade even before the char-
acters on the screen made the same decision. They felt the lm was
the clearest of lessons in the humanity of solidarity and again thought
the movie was excellent. Yes, there were defects: it moved too slowly; the
actorseven though they knew them to be actual rebelswere evi-
dently self-conscious about being lmed. But these and other weak-
nesses did not obscure the ecacy of the message.
A viewing of the lm today conrms that the original critical acclaim
given in particular to the last episode was not undeserved. Shot on loca-
tion in Santa Clara itself, the agile montage gives a clear overview of the
course of the battle, all the more notable in that it does so with a mini-
mum of dialogue. And again, according to Heras Len, The derailment
 146 The First Feature Films

Filming Historias de la Revolucin. Left to right: Toms Gutirrez Alea, Toms

Rodrguez, Che Guevara.

and the capture of the armed train, the scenes with the tank regiment,
the ghters throwing Molotov cocktails left and right, the organization
within the chaos of battle, the reception given to the heroes after the
battle, and then the tragic nalewhich demonstrated that the price of
victory is always, above all, paid in human livesilluminated those
moments that get a little lost in legend. The tragic twist to the episode
is the unfortunate death of one of these heroes, after the battle has been
won, and unbeknownst to his compaera, who joins the funeral cortege
amid the celebration of victory honoring the fallen ghter only to dis-
cover that the dead man is her own compaero.
The processes of audience identication in this lm, however, con-
tinue to be basically the same as in the conventional war movie. At rst
sight, the nal twist is no dierent from devices used in conventional
war movies for purely sentimental eect, which, on the ideological plane,
alienate the viewers intelligence from the historical signicance of the
events portrayed. Normally, the lm says, This is the eternal, universal
content of war, and pushes into the background the question of why
this war, what these people are ghting for. And this isnt just the ab-
sence of contexts, its the brazen rejection of context. But this is not
what was happening for that audience of which Heras Len was part.
He says that the lm seemed to them to have none of those scenes that,
 The First Feature Films 147

however full of emotion, the Cubans habitually found distant either in

space or time, as in lms of the Second World War, or even the assault
on the Winter Palace in 1917, which was already enveloped in the fog of
history. Here it was our own image, our own history, our own day-to-
day fact magnied by legend. In short, it was successful because a sense
of immediacy linked the time and space on the screen with that of the
audience in the cinema. This was a rare experience for the Cuban audi-
ence, and it didnt combat, but rather intensied, the regular process of
naive audience identication that is associated with the kind of lm
icaic was committed to ghting against.
For the lm is clearly conceived in as un-Hollywood a way as the
Cubans could manage at that moment. The paradigm of Italian neo-
realism is present in its episodic form, a narrative structure introduced
by Rossellini in Pais of 1946, which was also shot by Martelli. Ironically,
however, Martelli (as well as the inexperienced laboratory workers)
failed to give the Cuban lm the real quality of the neorealist image. By
the late 1950s, Martellis photographic style had changed, his lighting
techniques had grown closer to Hollywood. The biggest problem was
lming the interiors that dominate the lms rst episode. They turn
out rather atly lit, perhaps the result of a misjudged compromise.

The appeal of the neorealist paradigm did not come about just because
Alea and others had studied cinema in Rome in the early 1950s. There
were certain parallels between the Cuban situation in 1959 and that of
the birth of neorealism fteen years earlier, though not, of course, in the
political sphere. However, the Italians had needed to make a virtue of
the lack of resources they suered as they emerged from the war, just
as the Cubans did in setting up a lm industry in an underdeveloped
country going through a revolution. And then the kind of movie both
groups of lmmakers were seeking to counter was closely similar. Both
had suered the domination of Hollywood. The Italians had decided to
take their cameras out into the immediate photogenic real world in
order to counter the fanciful studio space of the white telephone lm,
the Italian fascist equivalent of the Latin American melodrama.
Revolutionary cinema, or a radical cinema in a critical situation, as in
Italy just after the defeat of the fascists, has always involved the discovery
of a new screen space to unfold in, which transcends the spatial (and
sociospatial) character of whatever cinema it aims to replace. It aims to
 148 The First Feature Films

show the world changing, and the need for change; it must change the
way the world looks on the screen in order to do so. One of the most
strongly determining factors in the character of Italian neorealism was
the starkness of the immediate photogenic world at the end of the war.
As time passed, the neorealists became committed to portraying the
indierence of the republic that replaced the transitional government,
and suocated peoples hopes and aspirations. If these developments
created a very dierent situation from that of revolutionary Cuba, the
ideas behind the neorealist aesthetic were far from theoretically inno-
cent or naive. The Centro Sperimentale, founded in the mid-1930s, had
been a forum for theoretical as well as practical instruction. Italian fas-
cism was culturally more sophisticated than Nazism; futurism was as
much an aesthetic of Italian fascism in the 1920s as of the Russian Revo-
lution, and in the 1930s Italian fascism considered that there was much
to learn in the art of propaganda from the communists. At the Centro
Sperimentale, an independent-minded man like Umberto Barbaro was
able to translate the writings on cinema of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Bla
Balzs, and others.
It was Barbaro who gave the neorealist movement its name. He used
the term to evoke the realism of early, prefascist Italian cinema, not as a
model to be imitated directly but to support a conviction that all human-
istic art demanded realism. Barbaro and other neorealists greatly admired
Soviet revolutionary cinema, but felt it was hardly an appropriate model
to be adopted in attempting the renovation of Italian cinema. Its sophis-
ticated style of montage depended on an audience, which even in revo-
lutionary Russia had been limited, geared up to a new kind of imagina-
tive participation in the lm, a condition that certainly did not exist in
Italy at the end of the war, where it had been lulled by two decades of
screen escapism. They did not reject Soviet montage as nonrealist like
the inuential French critic Andr Bazin (but then Bazin was an invet-
erate idealist, in the mold of the French Catholic intelligentsia). They
regarded it as inapplicable for conjunctural reasons: because it was cul-
turally and historically alien. Barbaro himself argued that montage was
the fundamental creative dimension of cinemathe fact that whatever
the style of shooting, the lm was still constructed by means of edit-
ingand for him the neorealist idea was not intended to negate this
but to constitute a particular way of providing the material upon which
montage operated. By dialectical reasoning, this meant that neorealist
 The First Feature Films 149

montage could not adopt the same appearance, the same rhythms
and tempi, as Soviet montage. These arguments were appealing to the
Cubans, who had limited knowledge but unbounded admiration of the
early Soviet classics, but, like the Italians, could not imagine, in the Cuban
context, simply trying to copy them.
In addition to going out onto the forbidden streets, and into real loca-
tions and real houses, it was also part of neorealist practice to nd nat-
ural actors instead of professionals. It was partly a matter of what
might be called aesthetic opportunism. Location sound recording was
still at that time physically cumbersome, and severely restricted the
mobility of the camera, which the neorealists prized above all else be-
cause it enabled them not simply to picture the external reality, but also
to move through it, to become part of it, as if they belonged there. Nat-
ural nonprofessional actors would improve the eect since they would
more easily behave as if they belonged to the spaces in which the lm
was unfoldingbecause in large part (not always) that is indeed where
they did belong. Professionals were too accustomed to the articial spaces
of studio and stage; nor at that time did they have the facility to repre-
sent the popular classes with conviction. The same was true in Cuba. In
Italy, they were used only to dub the voices of the nonprofessionals
afterwards. This was partly to provide the lms with standard Italian
pronunciation and avoid the diculties of introducing regional ac-
cents. It was also a necessity imposed by the constraints of the times: to
have postsynchronized the voices of the nonprofessionals themselves, as
the Cubans did in El Megano in 1956, would have required too many
expensive dubbing sessions; this was not a problem for the Cubans be-
cause El Megano was made clandestinely, with borrowed facilities and
without commercial budgeting. But the Italian audience was, in any case,
used to dubbing: the fascists had required all foreign lms to be dubbed
rather than subtitledit made censorship easier and guaranteed a cer-
tain regular ow of work to the dubbing studios.
As Italian neorealism developed, the lms the Italians made conrmed
that certain themes have a particular anity with certain kinds of space,
and the entry of the camera into new spaces it had not previously been
allowed to enter permitted new subjects to be conceived and new kinds
of narrative treatment to be evolved. It became easier to break with the
conventions of melodrama, with literary inuences, with the specically
cinematic trickery of devices like the ashback, and the deceptions of
 150 The First Feature Films

the techniques of suspense. Stories could be developed out of the anec-

dotes of everyday existence, and narrated by a camera moving with un-
obtrusive ease among the characters and places of the lm, obeying the
natural rhythms and order of the events. When the Cubans adopted the
neorealist paradigm, there was no need for them to use it to expose con-
tinuing deprivation and ocial indierence, for here the government was
a revolutionary one. But the neorealist aesthetic still contained many ele-
ments that were readily transferableabove all, those that brought to
the screen the real social world outside the cinema dream palace.

Even at the beginning, however, the Cubans did not treat neorealism as
an exclusive doctrine. While employing nonprofessional actors, for ex-
ample, they also searched out professionals to whom they could entrust
a good proportion of the lead parts. This wasnt just because they
werent dogmatic, but because they were also thoroughly pragmatic. If
appropriate professionals could be found, their experience could help
othersincluding the crew, so many of whom were total beginners.
Moreover, in this way, icaic could begin to build up a team of actors, a
company of sorts, which is always in one form or another an integral
part of a thriving cinema. What chance otherwise of creating a Cuban
school of dramatic lm art?
Not only that. If Historias de la Revolucin is clearly conceived in the
neorealist tradition, Garca Espinosas Cuba baila is in certain respects
clearly not; for Cuba baila is an attempt to exorcise the Latin American
melodrama, not by seeking radical alternatives but by taking its con-
ventions and turning them around. From this point of view, it has little
to do with neorealism except in the way certain scenes were shot. The
lm was born of what is to become for Garca Espinosa a perennial
concern, that of using a form with which the audience is thoroughly
familiar, in order to take them through its surface illusions to the social
reality it has conventionally been used to mask. Not too didactically,
however, for, according to the criteria he later elaborated in his concept
of imperfect cinema, a lm still has to entertain. In the end, it is a
question of overcoming the opposition between notions of didacticism
and notions of entertainment.
The main originality of Cuba baila lies in its treatment of music. When
he rst conceived it before the Revolution, he thought of it as a kind of
Cuban musical but with a dierence: where the Latin American musical
 The First Feature Films 151

used music for purposes of evasion, here it would fulll a dramatic func-
tion by becoming a vehicle for the class analysis of the pseudorepublic.
He had not been able to nd the backing for such a lm before the Rev-
olution, even after he had reworked the lm with Cesare Zavattini when
the neorealist master had visited Cuba. But icaic readily undertook
its production and the script was reworked another time by Garca
Espinosa, Alfredo Guevara, and Manuel Barbachano Ponce. Visually
undistinguished, even plain, the image is nonetheless given another
dimension by the music: the lm works upon the characteristics of the
social spaces, public, private, or semipublic, in which the dierent pieces
of music that occur in the lm are played and heard. Of course, it may
well have been neorealism that made Garca Espinosa sensitive to this
way of sensing space.
The premise of the lm is that while music, of all the popular art
forms, had sustained the strongest vigor, it was no less susceptible for
that to the uses that bourgeois ideology found in it. The story concerns
the family of a minor functionary in which the daughter is about to cele-
brate los quince, the fteenth birthday, which is traditionally the occa-
sion for a big family esta, which, the higher up the social scale you go,
becomes more of a social coming-out party, a girls launching onto the
marriage market. The lm moves through all the social spaces that make
up the world of such a family, together or separately: from the home to
the fathers oce, through bars and streets and other public areas and
into the exclusive milieu of the esta hosted by the fathers boss for his
own daughters fteenth birthday.
The mother of the protagonist family is keenly aware of the impor-
tance the music at her daughters esta will play. Although the cost is
almost prohibitive, she wants an orchestra like the one that impresses
them as minor guests among the upper bourgeoisie. Musically, such an
orchestra means the Viennese waltz and North American hits, instead
of the popular Cuban dances preferred by the daughter herself and her
local boyfriend, whom her mother slights. To obtain a loan to pay for it,
the father has to ingratiate himself with his superiors at the oce by
attending a political meeting in a local square. A band is employed to
attract the public, but the politicians cannot hold the crowd; vociferous
heckling rains down on them and, much to the petty bureaucrats conster-
nation, the meeting breaks up in violent disorder. In contrast, the passen-
gers on a bus whistle together a popular tune with politically different
 152 The First Feature Films

Cuba baila (Julio Garca Espinosa, 1960)

overtones. Here the lm comes close to suggesting a dierent paradigm

to neorealism, that of the French Popular Front lms of the 1930s, where
songs and dancing also play an important and positive role in portray-
ing the social cohesion of the popular classes.
The parents plan for a posh party fails to materialize. In the end, and
much to the daughters satisfaction, everyone is forced to go o and
celebrate the esta in a popular open-air entertainment garden where,
although the familys socially superior guests condescend to attend, the
mother feels defrauded. The satire in this last scene is gentle but leaves
no room for doubt about the hypocrisy of bourgeois values, as the cam-
era watches the awkwardness with which the condescending guests
dance to the popular music, while the daughter and her boyfriend mix
unselfconsciously with the crowd.
The lm has shown how the natural social functions of musicin-
cluding the way it expresses and creates social cohesionbecome cor-
rupted when it is made to conform to corrupt or discreditable social
ends. It oers a portrait of the prerevolutionary Cuban bourgeoisie that
supercially conforms to the format of the family melodrama but, more
deeply, through its careful use of music, mocks the stupidity of bourgeois
 The First Feature Films 153

convention. Perhaps the lms most surprising aspect is how much re-
mains implicit, especially in comparison with the French Popular Front
movies of the 1930s. It has none of the propagandizing socialist content
of lms like Renoirs Le Crime de M. Lange, even though one might ex-
pect more rather than less in a lm by a revolutionary lmmaker in the
euphoria just after victory.

It was in his second feature, El joven rebelde (The young rebel), made
the following year, that, as Ugo Ulive put it, Garca Espinosa paid his
debt to neorealism. The lm has an original script by Zavattini, reworked
by Jos Massip, J. Hernndez Artigas, Hctor Garca Mesa, and Garca
Espinosa himself, and the story is that of a seventeen-year-old peasant
boy, Pedro, who leaves his family to join the guerrillas in the Sierra.
First, however, he needs to nd himself a gun of some sort, the new
recruits passport. Together with a friend, he sets o to steal a revolver
from the friends uncle. But the plan misres, and the friend is sent
home again.
Out on the open road, Pedro gets a ride from a wily old peasant who
understands full well that the youngster is aiming not, as he claims, to
get a job on a coee plantation but to join los barbudosthe bearded
ghters in the hills. At a village where soldiers are stopping and search-
ing anyone they suspect of carrying supplies to the guerrillas, the old
peasant covers for Pedro. On his own again, the boy enters a bar where
he grabs the opportunity to steal a soldiers rie. The soldier gives chase
across the elds and corners him. Pedro res and the soldier is wounded.
The camera lingers on Pedros face, his eyes alight with a mixture of
anxiety and pride at his rst unexpected shot at the enemy.
His arrival at the rebel camp, where the troop drills with pieces of
wood for guns, brings with it his rst set of lessons. To start with, the
small girl serving as lookout who brought him into the camp turns out
to be a boy. The surprise hardly has time to sink in when the rie he
brought is taken away from him because, he is told, it belongs not to
him but to the Revolution. His attempt to resist the loss of what is obvi-
ously the proudest possession he has ever had produces his third quick
lesson in succession: a new gure appears to resolve the problem,
Artemisa, a gure of evident authorityand hes black. Although feel-
ing humiliated, Pedro sumbits. We soon begin to realize that the very
obstinacy that brought Pedro to the Sierra is to cause him problems, as
 154 The First Feature Films

he tries to evade the guerrilla school by claiming to be able to read al-

ready. But, in a gently ironic scene following an air attack, his ignorance
is exposed by his failure to read the inscription on an unexploded bomb:
Mutual Aid usa.
Then Pedro is sent on an expedition to the coast to steal salt from the
salt pans. He dawdles on the way to talk with a young girl washing clothes
at a pool. An understandable slackness of discipline, it is also a moment
of characteristically Cuban nature symbolism: as the girl asks Pedro to
bring her a seashell on the way back, the promise of the sea is associated
with a sense of erotic anticipation. At the salt pans, the utmost discipline
is needed in order to break cover as soon as the clouds hide the moon,
reach the salt, ll the sacks, and retire again before the moon reappears.
Pedro works fast and then puts down his sack and steals o to the shore-
line to search for a shell. He has never seen the sea before and he pauses,
looking at it with absorbed fascination. Only as the moon reemerges
does he remember the need for haste, and rushes to pick up his tem-
porarily abandoned sack. Too late, for he has been spotted, and shots
ring out. His comrades watch helplessly from the wood, which he nally
reaches in safety after a zigzag run pursued by machine-gun re. The
scene is directed with impressive restraint, dominated by long shots and
a rhythm that corresponds to the slow tempo of the movement of the
clouds across the sky. The visually arresting locationthe strange dim
white of the salt pansdoes the rest. It enjoins us to share Pedros feel-
ing of magic at the seashore while also letting us sense the danger of his
dalliance.
Conventional techniques of suspense reduce the conict of contra-
dictory perceptions to a unidimensional forward pressure with an arti-
cial climax, because narrative convention normally assures us of the
outcome in advance. But here the peculiar calmness of the scene gives
rise to more complex responses. Given to experience a clash of emo-
tions each of which is positive, we end up understanding the boy far
better, and his situation more fully: the way his youthful, naive, and so
far frustrated appetite for experience is precisely what gives him the
self-possession he needed to join the rebels, and how it may lead at times
to pride or indiscipline.
The rest of the lm is devoted to showing how the guerrilla ethic
knows this and is ready to tame it tenderly and constructively. During
 The First Feature Films 155

the return to the camp, just before the expedition is caught in an un-
expected air attack, one of the recruits, Campechuelo, complains of
hunger. In the rain the next morning, the group passes the village where
the girl who asked Pedro for the seashell lives. The village has been
bombed overnight, the inhabitants are leaving, and when Pedro nally
nds the girl departing with her family, they are able only to exchange
silent looks, as he reaches into his sack for the gift. Back at camp Pedro
is still unruly enough that he has to be reprimanded for uttering a racist
insult and picking a ght when he volunteers for a dangerous mule-train
escort but is passed over for being too inexperienced. When the mule
train arrives, it is carrying the body of the comrade Pedro fought with,
who died after a fall into a ravine.
Next morning the camp is summoned to an inquiry: during the return
of the salt expedition a cheese ration was stolen. The compaero is asked
to confess but after a silent pause the comandante conducting the inquiry
is forced to name him: Campechuelo. Pedro is thunderstruck. Artemisa,
prosecuting, asks for punishment according to the regulations. Within
a few hours, he says, we shall be ghting against an army equipped
with tanks, heavy artillery, and planes. What do we have? We have the
trust that exists among ourselves. Turning to Campechuelo, he contin-
ues, Now youre suering, but before you lied. Everyone trusted you
and you lied. Can you be trusted now? Its easy to say Im with the Revo-
lution but do you know what the word means? It signies everything
changing, beginning with ourselves. Youre the same as before. Cuba
has a great many things . . . sugar, tobacco, coee, its a rich country
with a poor people, because there are thieves, big thieves. How can you
judge them if you steal the ration from your comrades? Campechuelo
is duly punished, on the eve of a battle that the camp is informed Fidel
has said will be decisive, by expulsion from the Rebel Army. As he is
called to prepare for battle, Pedro protests to Artemisa. Artemisas face
shows that he comprehends Pedros confusion, and he does no more
than quietly order him to leave the humiliated Campechuelo and join
the others. The lm ends in mid-battle, with Pedro taking over the ma-
chine gun at which Artemisa has been killed, and we recall Artemisas
last words to Pedro before the battle: Now youll earn your gun.
Heras Len recalled the lms original impression; the youthful audi-
ence felt themselves to be
 156 The First Feature Films

the undisciplined youth, stubborn in the face of orders, anarchic and

naive, whose desire to ght justied all his actions, all his rebelliousness
and incomprehension. . . . Again, the technique didnt worry us. Of course,
we would have preferred the youngster to have a more expressive face,
not so hard, not so withdrawn, especially in the last scene in which his
consciousness is awakened and changes from a young rebel into a revo-
lutionary soldier; we would have preferred if Isabel, the naive peasant
girl, had had an attitude less like that of an underdeveloped Silvana
Mangano; that Garca Espinosa, the director, had taken care that the
photography captured the Cuban countryside with greater veracity; that
Pedro had shot the drunken soldier with greater decision; and nally
that the last scene hadnt been so much like La patrulla de Bataan by
reason of its long close-up on Blas Moras face.

La patrulla de Bataan was Bataan, starring Robert Taylor, George

Murphy, and Lloyd Nolan, directed in 1943 by Tay Garnetta Cuban
favorite.
Not all these criticisms are equally valid. To criticize Pedros indeci-
sion in shooting the soldier he stole the rie from, for instance, betrays
idealistic impatience in the viewerit is, in fact, a scene both eectively
mounted and acted. But then this idealism of the lms rst viewers was
an extension of Pedros on the screen.
At the same time, there are some subtle and signicant symbolic shifts
and parallels in the nal sections of the lm that may well have escaped
them. In his determination to keep his promise and bring the seashell,
Pedro demonstrates an essentially generous spirit, which contrasts with
Campechuelos meanness in stealing the cheese rationall the more so
because in the midst of the destruction of the village the symbolic mean-
ing of the seashell changes: it becomes less a sentimental gift than a
metaphor for the promise of victory. But then Pedro insults a man and
picks a ght and then feels irrationally guilty when the man he fought
with dies an accidental death. Complexities like these give the lm its
most paradoxical and didactic quality: that it is a lm about heroism
that is antiheroic, a lm about ghting that is antimilitaristic. To recall
that the young rebel is a peasant, and to recognize in the lm its projec-
tion of the peasant character as a paradigm of the spirit in whose name
the Revolution was undertakenthe untutored appetite for experience,
impetuous but generousthis is to grasp why and in what sense it has
been claimed that the Cuban Revolution is not militarist, in spite of its
 The First Feature Films 157

guns and uniforms. El joven rebelde is not a paean to the military insti-
tution, and not at all about strategies and tactics, but about the ethical
education of a guerrillero.

The other ction lm of 1961 was scar Torress Realengo 18, a modest
picture of sixty minutes (though El joven rebelde is only eighty-three).
The title of the lm refers to one of the ownerless tracts of land that
dispossessed peasants used to settle, and the lm deals with an incident
during the Communist-led popular rebellion of the mid-1930s. It takes
place in the sierra in eastern Cuba in which the guerrillas later estab-
lished their principal liberated zone. The story is one of division within
a family. After his father has been shot dead, and against his mothers
wishes, the son, in need of a job, joins the local guard. When a North
American sugar company decides it wants the village lands, he ends up
having to point a gun at the people of his own village with his staunchly
deant mother one of the leaders. The story has a Brechtian simplicity
to it; the handling of the camera is unfortunately rather sti and con-
ventional. Its achievement is that it successfully applies a neorealist
approach to a historical subject by using nonprofessional actors who
included survivors of the events portrayedone of Latin American
cinemas rst attempts to do this.
With one major exceptionAleas Cumbite of 1964this is really,
from a practical point of view, as far as the heritage of neorealism reaches
in Cuban cinema. But this exception is a remarkable one. Cumbite is not
only icaics last neorealist picture, it is also visually the most striking: its
stark black-and-white photography creates a feeling of tropical country-
side better than ever before; there is an absence of background music; the
narrative has the form of chronological anecdote; it is told with slow,
deliberate pace to give time for the patient observation of everyday ac-
tivities. Like Realengo 18, it employs neorealism in representing a histor-
ical period, but this time the lm is ctional: based on Jacques Romains
novel Les Gouverneurs de la Rose, it takes place in 1942, and tells about
the return of a Haitian, Manuel, to his home village after fteen years in
Cuba. It is the rst of a number of Cuban lms about Haiti, all of them
made with the participation of the Haitian community in Cuba.
Manuels years in Cuba have given him a knowledge of the world,
enough at least to make him critical of the fatalism of the Haitian peas-
 158 The First Feature Films

ant, product of the fate of the Haitian Revolution, its ossication into a
static society and a repressive dictatorship. Returning to his village, he
nds the villagers facing the problems of drought. If water doesnt fall
from the sky, one of them tells him, theres no water. We are wretched
negroes. It is the lack of the negro, Manuel tells his mother, not of
the good Lord. He knows they can nd water and build an irrigation
system. He tries to explain to the villagers, Look, we are the earth, with-
out us it is nothing. Many are uneasy with his challenge and regard
him as an interfering outsider; they take rancor at his liaison with one
of the village girls, Analaisa. This sentimental subplot Alea handles with
the greatest restraint.
Manuels scheme requires a cumbite, a general assembly of the village,
because it requires collective labor and, moreover, Manuel wants the
water to be collective property. Some of his opponents declare his pro-
posals illegal and call him a subversive. Then he is killed in a fatal night-
time attack by his rival as Analaisas suitor. On his deathbed he tells his
mother that Analaisa knows where theres a water sourcethey discov-
ered it togetherand his death shocks the village into realizing the
benets the scheme will bring.
Cumbite, according to a group of Venezuelan critics in 1971, a bit
harshly I think,

is characterized by its extreme sobriety. Nothing protrudes, the story is

ne, the actors well cast, the images plastic, the narrative advances in
spite of everything. But perhaps its too sober. Incorporated in the lm
are some sequences showing voodoo ceremonies. They are treated with
an almost anthropological vision, with tremendous respect, the gratu-
itously picturesque is at all costs avoided, but in this way it seems to lose
all its force, all intensity in the expressiveness that is worked into the
material. The result is a lm that is correct but removed, that succeeds
neither in stirring, nor surprising, nor convincing, nor entertaining. The
exploration by Cuban cinema of a world not its own remains a hybrid
experience and apparently without perspective.2

Perhaps, since Venezuela has its own black culture, its own versions
of voodoo, these critics are more sensitive to the representation of these
things than a European eye, but it is still important to say that the lm
has its own integrity, and a sense of authenticity that is guaranteed not
only by the participation of the Cuban Haitians but also by the way the
camera watches their ceremonies, without any trace of voyeurism, but
 The First Feature Films 159

moving around with considerable uidity. It is this uidity with the

camera that is to become one of Aleas distinctive capacities as a direc-
tor and an important stylistic trend in Cuban cinema.
In any event, the lm has several layers of signicance, among them
the allegorical. It is a lm of solidarity with the Haitian peasant and a
lesson in revolutionary ethics and the practice of collectivism. But it is
also a lm about the cultural complexity of underdeveloped society and
its internal contradictions, for the collective spirit that Manuel seeks to
mobilize is already present in the traditions of the cumbiteand in the
form of the religious ceremonial. It is not a lm that views these things
schematically, or from a position of, as it were, higher revolutionary
wisdom. It takes up an aspect of Fidel Castros thinking that is both
characteristic and essential to its revolutionary style: the refusal of the
sectarian idea that only the purest proletarian elements in the society
are capable of correct revolutionary action. This would be to deny the
capacity to learn, which is common to every human being, a capacity
that in Paulo Freires idea of cultural action for freedom is recognized as
a powerful social force.3
Finally, there is a stylistic paradox, for in Cumbite neorealism be-
comes a kind of farewell to the past. The rapid progress of the Revolution
has already, by the time this lm was made, created a distance from the
conditions only ve years earlier. As Alea has recalled:

When we began to make lms in a post-revolutionary situation the

neorealist mode of approaching reality was very useful to us because in
that early stage we needed little more. First of all, we were not developed
enough as lm-makers to posit other approaches. Secondly, our own
national situation at that juncture was . . . very clear. All we had to do was
to set up a camera in the street and we were able to capture a reality that
was spectacular in and of itself. . . . That kind of lm-making was per-
fectly valid for that particular historical moment.
But our revolution also began to undergo a process of change. Though
certainly not the same as that which occurred in post-war Italy, the mean-
ing of external events began to become less obvious . . . more profound.
That process forced us to adopt an analytical attitude towards the reality
which surrounded us. A greater discipline, a much more exact theoret-
ical criterion was then required of us in order to be able properly to
analyse and interpret what we were living through.4

The theoretical criterion that Alea invokes here is not a particular

theory of lm or style, but the application to all theoretical and stylistic
 160 The First Feature Films

principles of the new way of thinking that was now established in Cuba,
revolutionary Marxismin a Cuban way, of course.

Before Cumbite, Alea had revealed another side of his creative personal-
ity in his rst comedy, Las doce sillas of 1962. This is an adaptation to the
Cuban Revolution of the comic novel of the early years of the Soviet
Revolution by Ilf and Petrov, which was also put on the screen by Mel
Brooks in the United States (The Twelve Chairs, 1970)the story has
that kind of crazy comedy. A masterful comedy auteur in the true Holly-
wood tradition that goes back to Chaplin and Mack Sennet, Brooks
made a very serviceable job of it, but with the dierence that he did it as
a period piece, whereas Alea does it as a contemporary satire on the
world immediately outside the studio. The story concerns the hunt by
Hiplito, the scion of a bourgeois family, and his rascally sidekick and
erstwhile servant scar, for a suite of English period chairs, in one of
which Hipolitos dying mother-in-law has hidden the family jewels. This
piece of information she delivers at the start of the tale from her
deathbed, when the chairs are no longer in the familys possession, and
there then follows an increasingly desperate and hopeless pursuit in
which Hiplito and scar compete against the family priest who ad-
ministered the last rites for the old woman and has hit the trail on his
own. The chairs are among property conscated by the Revolutionary
Government, to be sold at auction; scar helps Hiplito raise the nec-
essary money to bidhe presents him to a secret meeting as a counter-
revolutionary in need of fundsbut things go awry at the auction, and
the chairs go to a variety of buyers. Several are sold to a circus, where
one is used by a lion tameruntil the lion tears it to pieces in a typical
scene, Hiplito and scar watching in desperate impotence for fear of
the jewels falling out right there in front of the audience. When they
nally track down the last chair, which was bought by the railway work-
ers union, they nd them already celebrating the good fortune of their
windfall.
Unexpectedly, Alea had the idea for this lm before the Revolution,
when it wasnt possible to make it. Now it was not only more apt, but the
Revolution itself provided the elements of the setting, beginning with
the lms Ministry of Recuperation in charge of conscated property.
Sets of initials of ocial organizations keep cropping up in the lm
real ones, inra, icp, icap, inder, even icaic itself. Then theres the
 The First Feature Films 161

whole ambience of conspiracy, the private settling of accounts within

the unsettled bourgeoisie at the moment of its dissolution, the activities
of the counterrevolutionaries, the treasures hidden in secret places and
as Alea himself points outthe possibility of making a lm about such
things. It is an imaginative adaptation, in which neorealist techniques
assist the incorporation of the real environment within the inevitable
stylization of the comedy form. It gives a kind of guided tour of the new
society. The conspirators, at one point, unwittingly hitch a lift on a lorry
taking volunteers to the elds to cut cane; at another they track down
one of the chairs to a blood-donor center where they nd the militia-
man on duty sitting on it. Both master and servant nd this new society
topsy-turvy and it upturns their own relationship too. They argue about
how to divide the spoils when they nd the diamonds: scar protests
that he is only trying to help his erstwhile master but if Hiplito doesnt
want his help he, scar, will go and nd the chairs by himself. Hiplito
objects, Just a momentremember, those diamonds are mine! To
which scar responds: Are you still insisting on private property?
Alea employs a variety of techniques, including documentary insert
and intertitles. He also cuts in quick shots that do not advance the narra-
tive but simply provide additional comic sideswipes. A newspaper seller,
for example, passes by announcing the latest newsthe publication of
Don Quixote. There are certain bits of satire, however, directly aimed at
a rather particular target. At the beginning of the lm theres an inter-
polated newsreel sequenceit parodies icaics own newsreels, which
have not yet fully escaped the old formulas: icaic Social Notes . . .
More hidden treasures foundvanity and selshness revealed; and
the commentator intoning, The dark interests of the past maintained
our people in ignorance in order to exploit them . . . At the end of the
lm, the target is a dierent branch of ocial art. Hiplito and Oscar
arrive at the Railway Workers Social Institute to nd a mural painter
describing to the workers the mural hes going to paint for themthey
have commissioned him with some of the money they got for the jewels.
He describes a tableau picturing the forces of the Revolution against the
forces of imperialism in the style of socialist realism. The workers, lis-
tening to his highfalutin ideas, conclude that he is a bit crazy.
It was in the course of making this lm that Alea and his crew dis-
covered how rapidly the changes wrought by the Revolution were taking
place: The Revolution implies a fundamental change in the structure
 162 The First Feature Films

of society, he said, but the appearance of things also changes from day
to day. A billboard announcing a luxury hotel in Miami and inviting
Cubans to spend their vacation there is substituted by another which
declares Cuba a territory free of illiteracy. Suddenly, where a large man-
sion previously housed counts or marquesses, there is now an art
school; where Cadillacs used to be sold, now they sell furniture for work-
ers who have been given houses by the Urban Reform. When we arrived
to lm a lonely vantage point over a valley we found a large hotel built
by the Tourist Institute full of tourists. Inside a building where we had
gone to shoot a number of scenes we found walls erected and walls de-
molished, a new arrangement of furniture and bricklayers at work every-
where, which obliged us to change our plans and to hurry the lming
through because of the danger that even during shooting they would
transform the scene around us. I think that the general rhythm of the
lm to some extent reects the vertigo of the Revolution.5
 CHAPTER EIGHT
Beyond Neorealism

In an interview he gave to a Peruvian lm magazine toward the end of

the 1960s, Julio Garca Espinosa spoke of the way the rapid development
of the Revolution took Cuban lmmakers beyond neorealism. Even
those who had made El Megano, he said, who had been imprisoned and
gone to work in clandestinity for the overthrow of Batistas government,
had believed that they were preparing only for a multiclass government
with the participation of leftists alongside the bourgeoisie, and with a
national program. Nobody thought at rst the outcome would actually
be a socialist governmenteven if that is what they had dedicated them-
selves to work for. Neorealism they saw as the model for an appropriate
cinemaa humanist and progressive aesthetic that oered a real alter-
native to the dominant modes of Hollywood and Latin American com-
mercial production. An antidictatorial nationalist bourgeoisie could not
have objected to it; it was a style that placed the people on the screen as
historical actors, but without being too explicit about it. But the rapid
radicalization of the Revolution demonstrated that there was both room
and need for a cinema to go further than this: straightforward neorealist
ideas could not really catch the speed and depth of revolutionary change,
though what kind of cinema could do this was not yet obvious, and
would not emerge for some years.
Alfredo Guevara wrote of neorealism in the rst issue of icaics lm
journal Cine Cubano as only one among several options.1 There was also
another lm movement on the horizon that was to exert its inuence in
Cuba, the French New Wave. Although yet to reach its peak, it had already

163
 164 Beyond Neorealism

been named, and Alfredo Guevara was able to mention in this article
the names of some of those linked to it: Molinaro, Malle, Vadim, and
Chabrol, and also that Simone de Beauvoir described the New Wave
directors as anarchists of the right. Nevertheless, he suggested, they
oered an interesting and valid lesson: they represented a cinema both
youthful and inexpensive, a cinema without stars (substantially true
at the time), a cinema that aimed to be rebellious. It was a cinema of
protest, aesthetically nonconformist, innovatory and iconoclast, ready
to confront respectable values and discard them without hesitation.
There was clean, fresh air in the work of the New Wave directors. Some-
times, it was true, they played games with Hollywood formulas, trans-
formed bedroom drama into sexual poetry, or indulged in shallow phi-
losophy and amateur psychology, all of which amounted to little more
than rebellion from the armchair or the bed. But some of their lms hit
the target of a genuinely new cinema: Franois Truauts Les Quatre
cents coups, Alain Resnaiss Hiroshima, mon amour. Most important,
these were new directors who showed no fear of the technology and
technicalities of cinema.
The demise of the Francophile Lunes group in 1961 did not mean that
the inuence of the French New Wave was to be curbed within icaic.
It could be said that, on the contrary, with the establishment of new
critical criteria the eld was clear only now for its inuence to be criti-
cally absorbed. And, in fact, we nd, over the next few years, a group of
short ctional lms clearly inuenced by the nouvelle vague, by a clutch
of apprentice directors who were subsequently to be internationally
acclaimed for their very dierently styled feature lms, including Hum-
berto Sols, Manuel Octavio Gmez, Manuel Prez, and Sergio Giral.
None of these lms is more than an apprentice work, but they are not
without interest. Sergio Giral, reminded of La jaula (The cage), which
he made in 1964, recalls it as rather too much inuenced by Godard.2
It tells of a woman suering from a paranoid psychosis. The story is
told rst from the husbands point of view and then from that of the
patient. Toms Gutirrez Alea plays the psychiatrist. Minerva traduce el
mar (Minerva interprets the sea, 1962) has the distinction of being the
only lm on which the poet Jos Lezama Lima ever collaborated, con-
tributing the hermetic verses heard on the sound track while a pair of
ballet dancers perform at the edge of the sea around a bust of Minerva.
 Beyond Neorealism 165

Sols, who was barely twenty years old when he made this lm with
scar Valds as codirector, laughs at it now as a naive experiment.3 A
year later, he and Valds made another mysterious short, El retrato (The
portrait), about a painter seeking inspiration by pursuing an imaginary
woman whose image he nds on a portrait in an abandoned house, a
tale that clearly reveals (the only thing about it that is clear) that good
intentions are not enough to banish fascination with ancient myths about
the sources of creativity. Then, in 1965, this time by himself, Sols directed
El acoso (The pursuit). This time the subject is less obscure. An escaped
mercenary from the defeated invasion of the Bay of Pigs kills a man in
the countryside, takes his clothes, comes upon a cabin where he rapes
the woman he nds there alone, and nally wanders lost and helpless
across endless mudats. The lm is primarily a stylistic exercise, but
this time by a student who has gained self-condence in the handling of
the craft. Refusing the technique of crosscutting that constitutes the
conventional chase movie, and with an almost static camera, Sols still
builds up an atmosphere of tension and menace, especially inside the
cabin after the rape.
These ctional shortsabout a dozen were made altogether, several
dealing with episodes from the guerrilla warwere originally intended
to be combined into feature-length lms made up of separate and un-
connected episodes. Apart from Cuba 58, no such lm was ever released.
In a couple of cases, the episodes were not released at all. Elena, directed
by Fernando Villaverde, and El nal (The ending), directed by Fausto
Canel, both proved problematic. Ugo Ulive quotes someone saying that
Elena was so absurd that it was unprojectable. Failures were inevitable
if the policy was to let untried lmmakers experiment.
The problem, in the eort to build a lm industry from scratch, was
how to train the personnel. As Alea wrote about lming Las doce sillas:

The main collaborators during the lming were young, without much
previous experience. The director of photography, the camera operator,
the focus-puller and the camera assistants were all working on a feature
lm for the rst time. Similarly the assistant director and the continuity
girl. Even the lm we were using (Agfa NP20 and Ultrarapid) presented
problems which hadnt been technically resolved by our cameramen.
We wanted to launch out with a crew of new people in whom we had
hope. Fortunately the lighting technicians, carpenters and production
 166 Beyond Neorealism

team included compaeros who were old hands and highly disciplined,
which gave us relative peace of mind, even though they also had appren-
tices engaged in this work for the rst time. Perhaps not everything
would go well. We had accumulated too many risks in the key positions
and this at times prevented our always proceeding smoothly.4

Largely to help deal with this problem of training, icaic followed

the development of the Revolution in looking toward the socialist coun-
tries for assistance, and the years 196264 saw three coproductions, one
each with the Soviet Union, East Germany (gdr), and Czechoslovakia.
In each case, the coproducing country supplied not only the director
but other principal personnel too. From the gdr, Kurt Maetzig directed
Preludio 11 (Prelude 11). Wolfgang Schreyer wrote the script with Jos
Soler Puig, a story about counterrevolutionaries in the service of the
cia making preparations for the Bay of Pigs. The director of photogra-
phy and the editor were also Germans. A team of Czechs came to make
Para quin baila La Habana (For whom Havana dances), directed by
Vladimir Cech, with a script by Jan Prochazka and Onelio Jorge Cardoso,
and again a Czech director of photography and editor, this time sharing
credits with Cubans. The story concerned the dierent paths taken after
the victory of the Revolution by two friends who had fought the dicta-
torship together, one of whom now found that his personal interests
were challenged by the new social order. Finally, Mikhail Kalatozov
(director of The Cranes Are Flying) directed Soy Cuba (I am Cuba) with
a script by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet, and a
Russian director of photography and editor. This was a lm of four
episodes showing dierent aspects of life in Cuba before the Revolution.
It was the most ambitious of these coproductions, and icaic knew
enough about Soviet production practices with their lengthy and leisurely
shooting schedules to prevail upon its comrades to bring their own trans-
port and equipment, so as not to tie up icaics limited facilities and
halt its other productions; by informal arrangement, the equipment was
then left behind in Cuba when they nished.5 None of these lms was
very successful. The Czech lm grafted its plot onto a supercial and
picturesque vision of Carnival in Havana; the German one was a mis-
calculated action movie; and the Soviet eort was a kind of delirium
for the camera from an impossibly baroque screenplaythe descrip-
tion is Ulives, but no one in Cuba thought much of these lms either.
 Beyond Neorealism 167

The truth is that while it made sense for icaic to undertake these co-
productions for both artistic and material reasons, the foreign visitors
didnt do their homework properlynot even Yevtushenko, who was
especially enthusiastic. Still, even he was unable to get beneath the skin
and go beyond the travelers image of the island that Soviet revolution-
ary poetry inherited from Mayakovskys visit in the 1920s.
The truth is that the visiting lmmakers were no better equipped to
respond to the expressive needs of the Cuban Revolution than the engi-
neers of their countries to the need for projectors to be used in a tropi-
cal climate. This was the kind of problem that cropped up continually
with the aid that Cuba received from the socialist countries. Many were
the disruptions caused by the wrench that the countrys xed productive
forces underwent as the U.S. blockade took eect, and technicians and
engineers of another breed stepped into the breach. icaics experience
was entirely typical. Most of the cinemas were in terrible condition, the
projection gear was old and decrepit, and the previous managers had
relied on the readily available supply of spare parts. As U.S. trade investi-
gators had reported years before, most of the equipment was purchased
secondhand in the rst place. Now it urgently needed maintenance and
replacement. The Institute conducted a technical survey and discovered
that it had inherited seventy dierent types of projectora real night-
mare. It made a count of the most common types and sent samples of
the basic set of spare parts to its East European partners so that they
could make molds from them and stave o disaster. It found, when the
new parts arrived and were installed, that they were not correctly engi-
neered for tropical conditions, and they buckled in the heat.

It is true, of course, that these coproductions may also have served a po-
litical purpose by helping to take the edge o sectarian criticisms of
icaic. Fidel himself directly addressed the problem of sectarianism in
the strongest terms in the spring of 1962, when he declared in a tele-
vision broadcast that the suppression of ideas was a myopic, sectarian,
stupid, and warped conception of Marxism that could change the Revo-
lution into a tyranny. And that is not revolution! The occasion was his
denunciation of the behavior of Anbal Escalante and others working
through the Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas (Integrated Rev-
olutionary Organizations [ori]), which had been set up in 1961 with the
 168 Beyond Neorealism

object of integrating the old Communist Party, the July 26th Movement,
and the Directorio Revolucionario (the group that carried out the attack
pictured in the rst episode of Historias de la Revolucin).
Garca Espinosa has described the behavior of the sectarians vividly:
their dogmatism, their rigidity in the face of the problem of creating
socialism, their rejection of the principle of armed struggle by the na-
tional liberation movements in Latin America. These failings, he said,
became well known. They also, he continues, had the eect of under-
mining the militancy that came from comradeship, the process of dis-
cussion with those who were still without direction, and the attempt to
stick to principles and avoid personal attacks. They made popular par-
ticipation, he said, almost impossible. The sectarians had an absolute
distrust of artists and intellectuals, whom they regarded as an irremedi-
able evil that they hoped would go away with time, to be controlled by
means of sops and small concessions. They placed their faith in training
up new generations, replacing their own tutelage for the inspiration
of the revolutionary process itself. They attacked cultural policies that,
through mobilizing this inspiration, aimed to raise the level of ideolog-
ical struggle against inherited cultural tendencies and trends.6
icaic leveled serious arguments against sectarian ideas as they af-
fected cultural politics, beginning with an address by Alfredo Guevara
to the First National Cultural Congress in which he criticized the ortho-
dox positions of the National Council for Culture (cnc) under Edith
Garca Buchacha. His point of departure was Fidels Words to the Intel-
lectuals and the claim that art could not exist in Cuba outside the Rev-
olution, which was itself a creative phenomenon of the highest order
and the only possible source of artistic innovation. He insisted, however,
that the endeavor of the artist was autonomous. For example, it has edu-
cational values but its purpose is not educational. icaic therefore be-
lieved that if a revolutionary message is required of the creator of a
work of art, in the same way as of a political speech or a philosophical
essay, then only one thing will be accomplished: the spiritual assassina-
tion of the creator, the asphyxiation of art in an oxygen tent. In the
light of the short ction lms they were producing, he was obviously
here defending the need for a space in which the young directors could
freely experiment in order to nd their feet.
He did more than defend, however. He launched a critique of pop-
ulism. Artists were being confused, he said, by theoretical propaganda
 Beyond Neorealism 169

and pseudocultural phraseology that tried to persuade them that the

way to reach the superior level of the people was to reduce the substance
of the work of art. Such falsely proletarian ideas could only breed the
crudest propaganda and demagogy, and then a primitive kind of art
would invade the most inappropriate places, which working people
would either overvalue or ridicule. This mechanical concept of the
working masses rise to culture will thus produce not the elevation of
the intellectual level but its debasement and disintegration. This is the
origin of the wave of bad taste that is washing over the country and that
is no way inherent in socialist development. The problem was a set of
erroneous, facile, and routine ideas to be found within the cultural
organizations, including the National Council of Culture, the Union of
Writers and Artists (uneac), and icaic itself. Up to now these orga-
nizations have not known how to say No! publicly and openly to this
ridiculous cartel, to the absurd murals that have invaded workplaces
and centers of social and cultural life, to the useless papering of each
wall, column, and window, many times to the concealment or deterio-
ration of true national momuments and sites, simply in order to meet
numerical goals rather than for the sake of political eectiveness.7

As chance would have it, icaic was given an opportunity to take up

battle not just with images on screens but on the streets as well. The
haphazard process of conscation and nationalization gave it possession
of a commercial graphics studio for making silk-screen posters. Sal
Yeln, son of an immigrant Jewish family and one of the most imaginative
of icaics production sta, immediately saw the possibility of icaic
going to work to produce its own cinema posters. It would be possible
in this way to invade the streets and link the battle against commercial
art and the aesthetic trash of the Hollywood poster with the struggle
against the cartel of bad taste. icaic would not only put its posters up
outside the cinemas but would erect poster stands all over the city, in
squares and on corners. To design the posters, it would call on individual
artists who, individualistic or not, wanted to be part of the process but
didnt know how, because they had too much integrity for the methods
of the cartel.
In this way, icaic became the midwife of an unprecedented artistic
explosion, and the Cuban revolutionary poster was born. Painters who
until then must have wondered what their fate would be, perhaps
 170 Beyond Neorealism

because their style was abstract and avant-garde, were now drawn into
the cultural process without having to compromise their aesthetic ideals.
As a Latin American observer, Nstor Garca Canclini, has written:

Artists used to painting canvases who move into this new form of pro-
duction have to subordinate, but not necessarily abandon, their taste,
emotional states, and desires to the collective message that is to be
transmitted. Good poster art, such as the Cuban or the Polish, does not
demand that the artist renounce personal style or experimentation,
because the message becomes more eective when, instead of being
direct and singular, it exhibits a certain tension between armation and
suggestion, and the clarity the message must have for its reception, and
the economy, condensation, and ambiguities that provoke the interest
of the receiver. What the good poster requires is that the personal and
formal search should be at the service of the object of communication.
Instead of the narcissistic complacency over individual language that
belongs to easel painting, the poster and the mural bring participation
in the decoration of the urban landscape, and in the formation of
popular taste and imagination.8

The new poster style rapidly began to drive the cartel out of business.
From a formal point of view, it was sometimes reminiscent of the revo-
lutionary Soviet poster before the institution of socialist realism. It not
only introduced colorful new images, it had a playful typographical style,
a direct response to the popular experience of the literacy campaign of
1961. As unesco was able to conrm, the campaign, in the space of a
year, reduced an illiteracy rate running in the countryside at up to 43
percent, to a level of 3 or 4 percent, which is normal in developed coun-
tries. The creative eects of the campaign in expanding the print mar-
ket and stimulating cultural consumption were contagious, and the new
poster expressed this in the animation it seemed to impart to the written
word, using imaginative plastic design combined with the utmost econ-
omy of means. The style was quickly taken up by other organizations
with a need for imaginative propaganda, and gave a good number of
artists much-needed economic employment. It also provided them with
spiritual sustenance, linking them with the revolutionary process through
their own productivity. This process brought their aesthetic ideas closer
to the popular viewer so that they could return to the creation of more
formal works without having to retreat into isolation. The eect that all
this had on the cultural image of the Revolution is neatly captured in a
story told by Ernesto Cardenal in the diary of his Cuban visit in 1970.
 Beyond Neorealism 171

The painter Portocarrero showed him a photograph of the large ceramic

mural of his in the presidential palace. He told me that some delegates
from Russia or one of the Eastern European countries at a reception
asked Fidel, with a certain tone of sarcasm, And what does this mean?
(meaning and what does this have to do with the Revolution?). Fidel
replied, Nothing, it doesnt mean anything. Its just some crazy thing
painted for some people who like crazy things of this kind, by a crazy
person who was commissioned by the crazy men who made this Revo-
lution.9 Certainly, by all accounts, Fidel is no connoisseur of art; but
he is also reported to have said to someone who demanded an end to
abstract painting (Khrushchev had just publicly condemned it): The
enemy is imperialism, not abstract art.10
The debate was soon taken up with energy. Julio Garca Espinosa for-
mulated a number of urgent questions on aesthetic matters in an article
in La Gaceta de Cuba, the publication of the Union of Writers and Artists,
in April 1963. The lmmakers then met for three days discussion in July
and published their conclusions as a document in the Gaceta in August.
The Gaceta was the successor to Lunes de Revolucin. It did not achieve
the same circulation but it was not the run-of-the-mill publication
lacking in originality claimed by K. S. Karol.11 The same issue that car-
ried this document also included articles on James Joyces Ulysses; on
Braque and the art of collage (the latter by Clement Greenberg); and an
announcement that the Unions library had acquired six hundred musical
scores, including contemporary works by Stockhausen, Webern, Berg,
Schoenberg, Bartk, Boulez, Eisler, Nono, Birtwistle, Haubenstock-
Ramati, Shostakovich, Pousseur, Messiaen, and others.
The lmmakers manifesto had twenty-nine signatories. Not quite
everyone, but the overwhelming majority. It was a forthright document
that declared that while it was both the right and the duty of the state to
promote cultural development, aesthetic tendencies and ideas are always
in a state of conict with each other and it is mistaken to try to impose
solutions. Moreover, the relationship between bourgeois and proletarian
culture is not exclusively antagonistic (as Lenin had pointed out) and
the obvious fact that a liberal bourgeois like Thomas Mann is a bet-
ter writer than Marxist-Leninist Dmitir Furmanov shows that a speci-
cally aesthetic criterion exists that cannot be reduced to the ideological
position of the writers. Art cannot be reduced to its external determi-
nants and formal categories have no class character. Therefore it is to be
 172 Beyond Neorealism

concluded that in the battle between aesthetic ideas, suppression on

the grounds that certain forms have an undesirable class character re-
stricts the evolution of art by restricting the struggle between the ideas
themselves.
Theoretically, the argument is not without contradictions, so that
when it was reprinted in Cine Cubano a couple of months later, Alfredo
Guevara pointed out that the editors of the magazine had certain reser-
vations about it, but they did subscribe to its conclusions and gave full
support to its signatories moral intentions.12 For the manifesto had
given rise to heated debate. Edith Garca Buchacha wrote a reply in the
Gaceta, other articles appeared in Cuba socialista and the Communist
Party newspaper Hoy, and the lmmakers were invited to a debate at
the University of Havana. In November, the Gaceta published responses
by Alea and Garca Espinosa.13 They both emphasized that the document
had achieved its purpose by stimulating all this discussion. Alea said he
didnt agree with every one of its points but with its antidogmatic spirit,
and he criticized certain professors who insisted that the real enemy was
idealism, not dogmatism, because (they said) at least the dogmatists were
on the right side. To the professors, the artists were suering from the
original sin of belonging to the bourgeoisie. But, as the writer Lisan-
dro Otero had pointed out, said Alea, so did Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Garca Espinosa, on the role of the party, admitted that its reaction to
the threat the dogmatists represented had been too mechanical. But he
went on to discuss the artists relationship to the audience in a way that
completely exposed the dogmatists populist myths. The issue has been
poorly represented in previous accounts of these episodes. The dogma-
tists, says Michle Firk, in a passage that Ulive quotes as if it summed it
all up perfectly well, tell the lmmakers, The Revolution has generously
given you the chance to make lms. What have you given in return?
The lmmaker answers, The Revolution has only fullled its duty; I
am an artist. The dogmatists say, Go to the people. The artist responds,
Let the people come to me.14 But this is not a very intelligent way to
represent the argument and has little to do with Garca Espinosas posi-
tion. Until now, he said, the only thing that has been insisted on is that
the artist should have more contact with the people and its problems.
This is correct, but it isnt enough. The people also need to have more
contact with art and with the problems of the artist. The public is neither
a monster nor an ignorant mass, as the reactionary and the decadent
 Beyond Neorealism 173

artist both see it, but neither is it a new species that has to be fed only
with predigested foods, as the dogmatists seem to believe. It is capable
of errors of judgment. It can be misled, for example, into accepting a
concept of productivity in art that it is false and mechanical to attempt
to apply.
This example, casually introduced, is cardinal. It puts the issue rmly
in the most rigorous Marxist terms: the question is about the production
and consumption of art, and in particular about the labor process of
the artistic worker. The Mexican philosopher Adolfo Snchez Vsquez
has examined this question in an essay titled Art as Concrete Labour,
in which he shows that the quantication of aesthetic labor by means
of its reduction to the same criteria as regular labor under normal con-
ditions of production is of no use in evaluating the work of the artist.
Why? Because the value of a work of art is determined by qualitative,
not quantitative, characteristics. To apply a common quantitative de-
nominator to artistic production can only lead in practice to a stan-
dardization of aesthetic creation, the mechanical reproduction of repet-
itive formulas that are totally incompatible with the creative character
of the imagination.15 This is precisely what Alfredo Guevara had spoken
out against at the 1962 Cultural Congress. The disquiet of the lmmakers
with the dogmatism of the sectarians was thus rather dierent from
that of the liberals of the Lunes group, and went far beyond abstract no-
tions of creative inspiration and freedom, just as it also went beyond a
simple attack on socialist realism as a stylistic norm. The icaic critique
of socialist realism was not just that it constituted a culturally alien style,
but that it resulted from an inadequate conceptualization of the condi-
tions of production in art.
For icaic, this was a practical, not a theoretical, issue. But in Cuban
revolutionary praxis, the two were very close, and the issue was part of a
theoretical debate on the nature of labor in a socialist society, a debate
that invigorated the Cuban Revolution and is closely linked with the
name of Che Guevara. So the lmmakers thought hard about their labor
process, and the question of how the lm crew should be organized in a
socialist society, in order to overcome the alienation of the capitalist
mode of lm production, and to release not just individual, but also
collective, creativity. Julio Garca Espinosa spoke about this in a partic-
ularly appropriate placethe Chilean cultural magazine Primer Plano
in 1972.16 icaics advantage, he said, was having the endorsement of a
 174 Beyond Neorealism

revolution, that is, of knowing that it was working not for an exploiter
but for the country. It was helpful to them that they were mostly young
and new to the medium, although there were also a few older people,
mostly technicians, accustomed to capitalist relations of production,
with its overtime payments and the rest. Overtime was one of the rst
problems icaic tackled, because it induced people to work slowly to
earn more money, and thereby damaged the collective. It instituted in-
stead a system of bonus payments for completing the work schedule
(plan de trabajo). This indeed fostered a more collective attitude toward
material reward. But it was only the rst stage, because the next was the
debate about moral incentives that Che stimulated.
Collective discussion produced concrete improvements to the labor
process. For example, icaic discussed the case of the director who used
time arbitrarily, who came along and asked the construction department
for a wall to be built for the next days shoot, and after they had worked
all night, he used only a small part of it in the shots he devised. So, to
nd more eective and economical methods of working, icaic tried to
develop a method of participation. It defended the prerogatives of cre-
ative imagination, but required discipline in its application. The result
was to help overcome the problems of divided labor, because it also
required the members of the dierent departments in the lm crew to
relate their specialisms to parallel problems in other departments, which
in regular capitalist lm production are often kept separate.
To meet the principles of collective participation, icaic evolved a
managerial system in which, while decisions were made by a directorate
whose members have various collective and individual responsibilities,
these decisions were based on collective discussion. In 1983, the year after
Julio Garca Espinosa succeeded Alfredo Guevara as head of icaic, one
of the directorate, Jorge Fraga, for some years head of production, ex-
plained to a group of visitors from Britain some of the ways collective
discussion in the Institute works: We dont plan anything without rst
having a collective debate with the directors, cameramen and everyone
else involved. We base our planning on their consensus. If we are increas-
ing production, notwithstanding the kind of restrictions we have, its
because in the last year weve made an agreement to make cheaper lms
in order to do more.17 In the same way, the pursuit of related themes in
a series of lms by dierent directors over the same period, like those
on the hundred years of struggle that were made in the late 1960s, was
 Beyond Neorealism 175

the result not of some kind of directive but of collective discussion, and
the consensual feeling that there is more to be gained by making lms
that support each other than by lms that in their choice of theme re-
main isolated.
Individually, the selection of lms is based on treatments, or scripts
in the case of ction, submitted by directors (or for rst lms, which
are always documentaries, by members belonging to other grades) to
the head of the appropriate department. Ideas are discussed, and advisers
may be called in, who are drawn from among the directors or script-
writers with most experience. Among the benets of this system, direc-
tors are always at work and earning their salaries, a necessary provision
when resources are limited and only a few lms can be shot at the same
time. This way, you are either working on your own script, on the basis
of an agreed proposal, or else you are working with someone else on
theirs. Each project goes through several stages, from synopsis to treat-
ment to script, which aids the process of planning and organization. It
also helps to stimulate discussion, Fraga said, because there is no cutting
away at nal results, which is the role of a censor: If you work in the
process from the start youre more constructive, youre part of it, trying
to stimulate and seek solutions.18 Alea has also spoken of the impor-
tance of the role of the adviser in this process. Trying to explain why the
North American lm critic Andrew Sarris was way o the mark in cer-
tain comments hed made, he told Julianne Burton: For me, this work
is just as important as my own personal achievements. I rmly believe
in our collective work. In order not to appear saintly, like some extra-
terrestrial being removed from all personal interest, let me explain: in
order to satisfy my individual needs as a director, I need the existence of
Cuban cinema. In order to discover my own concerns, I need the exis-
tence of the whole Cuban lm movement. Otherwise, my work might
appear as a kind of accident within a certain artistic tendency. Under
such circumstances, one might enjoy a certain degree of recognition,
but without really achieving the level of personal realization to which
you aspire. This isnt a question of personal success, but rather of the
conviction that youre giving all you can in an environment where
everyone, without exception, has the same possibility.19
Behind the introduction of a system of participation in icaic, there
lies an undogmatic analysis of the relations of production in the lm
industry. Fraga again:
 176 Beyond Neorealism

Well, as everybody knows, cinema is a collective art. Even in Hollywood

its a collective art, and this is based on a division of labour. So the main
question is how this collective is organised and how the individualities
play within this collective. We dont have a norm to determine the way
that the individuals and the collective are interlinked. It is dierent with
dierent directors and dierent people, but in general terms there is
a consensus, and the consensus is that art is a very personal process,
whether it is an individual or a collective art, and the collective spirit
and discussion involved in the various stages of lm production cannot
replace the role of the personality. We are collectivists because we think
that the growth of the personality needs a basic requirement: a collective
sense of responsibility.

icaic combined collective discussion with improvisation. It had to

compete with numerous other organizations for scarce resources. The
national building and construction program, for instance, did not allow
icaic as many new cinemas as it would have liked. It would quietly
deliver additional architectural plans, however, in the hope that some-
one else would miss the deadline. Such initiatives didnt always succeed.
On one occasion, in need of specialist technicians, Alfredo Guevara
enlisted the help of his brother, a psychology professor, to carry out an
investigation to nd the years best technical graduates. They were in-
vited to join icaic but failed to turn up. It turned out that the list had
fallen into the hands of Fidel, who commended his friends initiative in
organizing the investigation but told him, Im sorry, you cant have
these people, we havent got such highly qualied applicants for the sugar
industry, we need them there!20 It was typical of the way Fidel inter-
vened in questions of the allocation of resources, human and material,
about which there are many stories. (His detractors use them as evi-
dence of dictatorial behavior.)
A major part of icaics work during this period, however, to which
resources were systematically devoted, was the organization of a new
Cinemateca, which began in 1961 under Hctor Garca Mesa. Of the old
one, nothing remained but the les with its program leaets in them.
The new Cinemateca was intended, from the outset, to be much more
than an archive of Cuban and world cinema, with its own auditorium.
Its activities were to extend throughout the island. It was to establish
lm theaters in other cities where the Havana programs could also be
presented, it was to be responsible for the mobile cinema units, and it
was to service and advise the lm clubs. It was to succor an active lm
 Beyond Neorealism 177

culture, from which eventually new lmmakers would emerge, just as

the generation of icaics founders had emerged from the lm-club
movement of the 1950s.
In Havana, the Cinemateca took charge of programming the new
cinema that was attached to icaics headquartersan oce block in
the bourgeois district of Vedado, originally occupied by dentists and
doctors. The Institute started out occupying the buildings fth oor but
soon took over the rest, remodeled the auditorium next door, and later
overowed into other neighboring buildings. The Cinemateca opened
its doors in 1961 with a season of Soviet classics of the 1920s to the 1940s,
provided by its Soviet counterpart Goslmofond, the rst time such a
comprehensive retrospective had ever been shown in Cuba. There fol-
lowed other national cinema seasons, from Czechoslovakia, Germany,
France, and Italy, as well as a world cinema retrospective supplied by
the International Federation of Film Societies.
It was an immense task the Cinemateca faced, to generate popular
comprehension and preference for a completely dierent kind of lm
than audiences were used to. It was compounded by the switch that
inevitably occurred when the United States imposed its blockade, and the
familiar Hollywood product was replaced by a sudden inux of lms
from the ussr and the other socialist countries. There was, to begin
with, no great liking for them. For one thing, when these countries rst
began to send their lms to Cuba, there were no eective arrangements
for their selection. No one in Cuba knew enough about the cinema of
these countries to be able to make such a selection, nor did anyone in
these countries know very much about Cuba and Cuban audiences. Films
were sentand they had to be shown, because new lms were at a pre-
miumthat were clearly inappropriate. Perhaps it was not a rich period
for socialist cinema and too many poor lms got through, but they were
mostly disliked because they were too dierent. How should an audience
brought up under the narrowest Hollywood tutelage be able to respond
spontaneously to lms from such dierent cultures, with such distinct
styles and symbolic systems?
icaic did its best to leaven the diet with lms from nonsocialist Eu-
rope, where cinema in the 1960s was undergoing a true renaissance. Not
that these European lms were by any means always easier to access, but
icaic believed passionately in aesthetic pluralism, in the conviction
that the only way for audiences to become more discerning was to have
 178 Beyond Neorealism

the opportunity and encouragement to see as many dierent kinds of

lm as possible. The result of this exhibition policy was renewed attack
from sectarian quarters. Early in 1964, the U.S. trade journal Variety
(February 12, 1964) gloated ungrammatically:

La Dolce Vita Stirs Taint Wholesome

Several years late, Federico Fellinis La Dolce Vita is stirring a number of
lively debates in Castros Cuba and adding immeasurably to the artistic
excitement in that tight (control) little island. According to a report
from Havana, by Maurice Halperin, published in the Jan. 9 issue of the
National Guardian [a small-circulation left-wing weekly that was sympa-
thetic to the Cuban Revolution] the Fellini pic started an ideological
brawl when Hoy, the ocial organ of the United Party of the Socialist
Revolution, editorialized that the pic could not be considered whole-
some entertainment for the Cuban working class.
Immediately, 10 directors of the ocial Cinema Institute jumped to
the lms defense in the newspaper Revolucin. They charged that Hoys
position was like that of the Catholic Church (Ed. note: In the us, the
Roman Catholic Legion of Decency gave the Fellini lm a separate
classication meaning morally unobjectionable for adults, with reser-
vations) and like the Hollywood Hays Code. Hoys position, reported
Halperin further, was pronounced a deformation of Marxist-Leninist
philosophy.
No one in Cuba, he goes on, denies the need for the state to control
the production or purchase of lms because of the lack of foreign
exchange. The problem is the criteria by which the lms to be bought
or produced are selected, and in the socialist world, value judgments can
be poles apart, as in the case of China or Poland or in dierent periods
of Soviet cinema history . . .
The current movie are up is part of a general and continuing debate
on art and society in which nearly all of the artists and writers who
embraced the revolution had always had free access to the competing
aesthetic currents of the whole world.
Halperin reports that the entire Cuban movie scene began perking
in 1963 after a year of movie drought during which people lined up to
see beat-up American lms pulled out of the archives while Bulgarian,
Czech and Chinese features played in empty houses.
Last year lms began coming into Cuba from Italy, France, Japan,
Britain, Spain, Argentina and Mexico. For the sophisticated moviegoer
1963 was undoubtedly a banner year in Havana. In addition to La Dolce
Vita, lms which were released included Buuels Viridiana and The
Exterminating Angel, Wajdas Ashes and Diamonds, Kurosawas The Brave
One and Richardsons The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
 Beyond Neorealism 179

The original piece in Hoy (December 12, 1963) was by a senior-ranking

Communist, Blas Roca, in his regular ideological question-and-answer
column. The icaic directors referred to by Variety replied in Revolu-
cin, where they compared Rocas position to the Hays Code and the
Catholic List. Alfredo Guevara wrote his own withering reply in Hoy
itself. To men like you, he wrote, the public is made up of babies in
need of a wet-nurse who will feed them with ideological pap, highly
sterilized, and cooked in accordance with the recipes of socialist realism
(December 17, 1963). K. S. Karol comments on the episode in a footnote:
Alfredo Guevaras use of such strong language could only mean that he
enjoyed the support of Fidel Castro, his old university friend.21 But
there is nothing shy in this: anyone can draw this conclusion from
what Fidel said in the Words to the Intellectuals; only Blas Roca hadnt
done so.

All along, icaic encouraged the development of every strand of promise

it discovered, an attitude that entailed the Institutes tolerance toward
aesthetic risk, experiment, and failure which Alfredo Guevara publicly
argued for. The growing pains were only expectable. For a short period
they were numerous, and the lms mentioned earlier by Canel and Villa-
verde were not the only casualties. However, both these directors went
on, like others who failed in some of their attempts, to be entrusted
with full-length feature lms (Eduardo Manet, for example, whose rst
feature project in 1961 hadnt even reached shooting). Few of these pic-
tures were successful. Ulive modestly omits any reference in his article
to his own feature, Crnica cubana (Cuban chronicle), made in 1963, a
story that attempted to show the changes that the construction of a new
society involves, which the commentators Torres and Prez Estremera
describe as simplistic. El otro Cristbal (The other Christopher), directed
in the same year by the Frenchman Armand Gatti, they describe as a
pretentious satire on Latin American dictatorships suering too much
from a European vision of its theme.22
This lm was never given a release in Cuba, though it was shown
in France with modest success. Eduardo Manet made Trnsito (Trac)
in 1964; Ulive describes it as a poor imitation of the insouciance of
Godards early lms. Manets second feature, Un da en el solar (A day
in the tenement, 1965), he calls a hybrid whose least disappointing
moments revealed a fruitless attempt to imitate the musical comedies of
 180 Beyond Neorealism

Stanley Donenthe lm added dialogue and songs to a ballet by Cubas

leading choreographer, Alberto Alonso. Fausto Canel also made two fea-
tures. The rst, Desarraigo (Uprooted, 1965), concerns an Argentinian
engineer who comes to Cuba with the intention of incorporating him-
self into the work of constructing the new society, but his romantic and
touristic idea of the Revolution impedes him. Its treatment, says Ulive,
was hasty, supercial, pseudomodern and the lm was a asco. Canels
second attempt, Papeles son papeles (Paper is paper, 1966), a comedy on
the theme of dollar smuggling by counterrevolutionaries during the
early years of the Revolution, was not much better. Jorge Fraga also
made two features, following the episode he contributed to Cuba 58. En
das como stos (In days like these, 1964) was based on a novel about the
life of voluntary teachers in the countryside and the eects of the expe-
rience on a girl of bourgeois extraction. He followed this in 1965 with a
theatrical adaptation, El robo (The robbery), dealing with a provincial
petit bourgeois family during the period of Batistas dictatorship. Fraga
himself considers neither of these lms to merit attention.23 The rst of
them was pretty aggressively representative of a stylistic modernity
inspired by new European art lms that many critics found hard to
take. Garca Espinosa later mentioned the lm as an example of the
pugnacity of the young directors who were trying to nd an equivalent
in the cinema of the modernity that the Revolution signied politically.
Ral Molina in the Gaceta de Cuba compared it unfavorably with the
two documentaries on closely related themes that Fraga had made pre-
viously, La montaa nos une (The mountains unite us) and Me hice
maestro (I became a teacher). The feature was too schematic, he said, in
comparison with the power of observation in the documentaries.24 The
criticism is highly signicant.
The most unfortunate case was that of Villaverdes El mar (The sea).
The script, says Ulive, could have been made to work in the hands of a
self-condent director, but the lm had to be aborted at the last moment
when it only remained to make the show printa costly mistake that
was also the most drastic measure taken against any lm in the entire
history of Cuba cinema. Villaverde, he says, was thrown into deep per-
sonal crisis, and shortly afterwards left Cuba with no intention of
returning. Villaverde was neither the rst (that was Nstor Almendros)
nor the last director to leave icaic and Cuba. Canel, Alberto Roldn,
Robert Fandio, the cinematographer Ramn Surez, Manet have all
 Beyond Neorealism 181

left. (Almendros was by far the most successful of them, though as a

cinematographer, not a director.) They all made lms that were not
exhibited, but they were not the only ones, and others, including Jos
Massip and Manuel Octavio Gmez, chose to remain (or rather, it didnt
cross their minds to go).

Both Massip and Gmez made promising feature debuts in these years,
with La decisin (The decision, 1965) and La salacin (The saltings,
1966), respectively. Both lms possess considerable uidity though the
control of the director is in neither case complete. Curiously, they sug-
gest as models not the French New Wave but the English. At any rate, in
spite of the dierent luminosity of the air south of the Straits of Florida
and north of the English Channel, their black-and-white photography
by Jorge Haydu and Jorge Herrerra, respectively, is reminiscent of lms
like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey.
Moreover, in both the narrative style is rather less orid than in the
new French lms, more calmly paced, as in the English, and the acting
quieter. Both lms also have this in common, that they center on young
couples whose partners come from dierent social classes, with the con-
sequent disapproval of both their families.
La decisin, which is set shortly before the Revolution, opens in a
classroom at the University of Santiago de Cuba during a lecture on
classical Greek society, a subject ironically contrasted with the tensions
and political dierences among the students. Daisy Granados makes her
screen debut as Mara, an artistically rather than intellectually inclined
daughter of a bourgeois family that disapproves of her liaison with Pablo,
the best student in the class and a mulatto from a poor background, the
nephew of a slavethe son of a son without a father, as he describes
himself. Their relationship is an awkward one, due to Pablos pride
the pride of someone who knows that the social order is refusing to
give him his due: his color bars him from getting the university teaching
post his academic achievements qualify him for. Pablo is his mothers
favorite, and has an uneasy relationship with his brother, who works in
the factory managed by Maras father, where he is active in the struggle
for union recognition. In spite of his experience of racial discrimina-
tion, Pablo cannot accept his brothers militancy and the argument for
revolutionary violence. Through these and other contrasts, the narra-
tive traces a series of structural oppositionsbetween black and white,
 182 Beyond Neorealism

worker and student, bourgeois and working-class, male and female,

struggle and fatalism, mother and daughter/mother and son, high cul-
ture and popular cultureby means of crosscutting between dierent
levels of the plot in dierent scenes of action. Probably the thing is too
schematic, but it comes to a ne, heady climax with the contrast between
the popular Carnival and the masked ball of high society that Pablo
gate-crashes in disguise, till his identity is discovered and he is forced to
ee. Carnival in Santiago is Cubas Mardi Gras, but it also carries polit-
ical associations as the day of the attack on the Moncada barracks in
Santiago in 1953, after which the July 26th Movement is named, chosen
by Fidel in the rst place because on this day the whole population is
busy singing and dancing in the streets (or high-society masked balls).
It here becomes an eective symbol for the popular forces that alone are
capable of guaranteeing justice.
La salacin deals with a pair of young lovers in the early years of the
Revolution harassed by the prejudices of bourgeois morality on the one
hand, working-class pride on the other. The girls is a petit bourgeois
family not unlike that of Cuba baila, the boys is working-class. He is
reluctant to get married because with his father dead he has to keep his
mother and two younger brothers on a mechanics wage. Visually stylish,
a particularly memorable sequence shows the couple meeting in a large
North Americanstyle house that stands abandoned by its former own-
ers. Evocative photography follows them entering as the rain pours
down outside. Thunder and echoing footsteps intensify the atmosphere.
The couple are drawn into this cavernous Freudian space where they
seek refuge in order to make love, but which makes them feel distinctly
uncomfortable at the same time. The tension they feel is at the heart of
the lm: the way in which the heritage of the physical environment,
shaped by the social relations of the past, interferes with the realization
of desire, and in the most immediate ways. Like Garca Espinosa in Cuba
baila, Manuel Octavio Gmez has a keen sense of the social signicance
of dierent spaces. This large, empty house is contrasted with the
crowded environment of the family apartment where the couple have
to retreat onto the tiny balcony to gain even a minimal amount of pri-
vacy, while behind them the family argues over the volume of the radio
and TV sets that dierent people have on in dierent rooms. This obser-
vation of social spaceand the mapping onto it of the relationships
among the family members, including mothers, cousins, auntslifts
 Beyond Neorealism 183

the rather coy love story out of the dissociation from social reality in
which the cinematic genres generally leave such couples. The lm shows
how the personal preoccupations of young lovers do not disappear in a
revolution, and what the social problems of the country look like from
their point of view. It has its limitations as a rst featureits style is
borrowed rather than thought outbut the intelligence of its social
observation combined with its personal concerns is sucient indication
of the breadth of sympathies that icaic was cultivating. It is also a
memorable lm for another screen debut: that of Idalia Anreus in the
role of the boys mother.
 CHAPTER NINE
The Documentary in the Revolution

The historical moment of the Cuban Revolution was also, by coinci-

dence, a period of aesthetic revolution in documentary cinema. Within
the space of a few years, 16 mm, previously regarded as a substandard
format like 8 mm or half-inch video today, was relaunched. Technical
developments, inspired by the needs of space technology as well as tele-
vision, stimulated the production of high-quality 16 mm cameras light
enough to be raised on the shoulder and in due course equipped with
fast lenses and lm stocks that reduced or even eliminated the need for
lighting. They ran quietly and could be matched with portable tape
recorders tted with improved microphones, directional if need be, on
which a synchronous sound track could be recorded by a sound recordist
as mobile as the camera operatorthough until the improvement of
the system, they moved around together, since they were linked by cords.
The result was that documentarists who had previously been forced to
shoot with bulky 35 mm equipment completely unsuitable for exible
lming away from a studio or prepared location felt as if reborn. New-
style documentary lmmakers sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic.
Thus the terms cinma vrit and direct cinema were born.
The concepts and practices of documentary go back to three develop-
ments of the 1920s: the appearance of a small lm avant-garde in cer-
tain countries of Europe; the work of a maverick lmmaker of Irish
descent in North America, Robert Flaherty; and the creation of a revo-
lutionary lm industry in Soviet Russia, which included the agit-prop
of Dziga Vertov and the comrades of the Kino-Train. There was also, at

184
 The Documentary in the Revolution 185

least as far as noncommunist cinema was concerned, a catalyst in the

person of a nonconformist Scottish intellectual who went to study the
emerging mass-communication society in the United States. It was he
who gave the term documentary its currency when he saw Flahertys
second lm and wrote in its praise that it had the force of a living docu-
ment. His name was John Grierson.
Within the group that he created in England upon returning from
the States, Grierson argued for a concept of the form as didactic and so-
cial rather than poetic and individual, within which the image was to be
employed for its status as plain authentic record of the actual. This aes-
thetic was based on a thoroughly empiricist philosophy that closely cor-
responded to certain practices of journalism. Although he did not say
it, it could be said that Grierson wanted the documentarist to regard the
nonctional image as an authentic document of social reality (to be
lmed as artistically as you like but with appropriate discretion), in
rather the same way that journalists take documents like parliamentary
reports or the sworn statements of witnesses as authoritative and unim-
peachable versions of events. For the journalist actually to believe the
authority of such documents, however, is plainly naive, and will some-
times cause problems. On similar grounds, the aesthetic that treats the
authenticity of the lm image uncritically can be called naive realism.
During the Second World War, the rather special conditions of ocial
sponsorship allowed a few gifted propagandists, like Humphrey Jennings
in Britain, to contribute some artistic development to the form. After
the war, the ideals that inspired the rst owering of the social documen-
tary seemed to dissolve (though they nd another location in neoreal-
ism) and the best documentaries in the postwar years mostly took the
shape of individual poetic essays by directors like Georges Franju and
Resnaisa form in which nonctional images provide the substrate
for a more or less literary kind of reection and self-expression. For the
rest, the documentary became a merely utilitarian form serving various
dominant ideological interests, including educational purposes con-
ceived in a rather mechanical fashion. The exceptions, like Joris Ivens
of whom more laterare very few. As Karel Reisz described one typical
prestige product of the genre from the 1950s:
Song of the Clouds has some distinguished names on its credits and, the
scientic lm apart, represents the norm of our documentary industry.
From the lm-makers point of view this is particularly disturbing because
 186 The Documentary in the Revolution

the lm represents the almost complete abdication of the creator in the

lm, the director. A lm of this kind is planned in terms of the facts it
will have to present; it is conceived in committee; it has a commentary
written by another hand, which tries to give the images a weight they do
not have. Under these conditions, the directors function becomes that
of a technician.1

At the time he wrote this, Karel Reisz was a member of a new docu-
mentary movement that anticipated the appearance of cinma vrit in
a number of ways, the movement known as Free Cinemathe style of
which the defenders of P.M. in Cuba in 1961 saw their cause clbre as
an example. Free Cinema was originally a handful of young British
lmmakers of liberal disposition including Lindsay Anderson and Tony
Richardson, who belonged to the generation of the so-called Angry
Young Men, and whose approach to cinema was originally made through
lm criticismlike that of several French New Wave directors and some
of the Cubans too. They presented a number of lms together under
this banner in London between 1956 and 1959. Stylistically, the lms
were rather diuse, but they had enough in common to make the group
name workable. Although the name was invented largely to attract pub-
licity, it signaled a certain attitude of humanist commitment and sense
of artistic responsibility that was real enough, and it quickly caught on
among lm critics and acionados. No one in similar circles in Cuba
denied that Free Cinema was an important idea. On the contrary, it was
regarded as an idea to be discussed and analyzed, with arguments for
and against its various features. Alea wrote about Free Cinema in an
article in Cine Cubano at the end of 1960before P.M. appeared.2 The
same issue of the journal announced the impending visit to Cuba by
Tony Richardson, who at that time had just graduated to features where
he caused a urry with his radical techniques, fresh sense of style, and
challengingly honest content. The Cubans saw Richardson as a represen-
tative of the same spirit of aesthetic renewal that was also to be found in
the postwar cinema of several other European countries (the Free Cin-
ema programs at Londons National Film Theatre had themselves in-
cluded two devoted to Poland and France), and he was one of many
foreign visitors invited by icaic to exchange ideas and, in some more
trusted cases, to work with it.
Aleas article was a polemic directed against accepting Free Cinema
uncritically. One of the best assessments of Free Cinema made by any-
 The Documentary in the Revolution 187

one, its historical signicance lies primarily in its implications for the
whole constellation of issues about documentary that icaic was then
debating, in which it went beyond the approach of liberal humanist
commitment. Free Cinema, Alea began, had been translated into Spanish
as cine espontneospontaneous cinema. This was not, he observed, a
literal translation. However, it was appropriate enough in the Cuban
context, where lmmakers no longer found themselves opposing an
unfree cinema compromised by its economic and political connections.
Free Cinema was obviously important because it was by denition anti-
conformist. Its origins lay with a group of young lmmakers faced with
obstacles to their freedom of expression erected by the commercial insti-
tution of cinema: the demand for scripts, actors, lights, makeup, planned
camera movements, special eects, and all the other ingredients of the
proper movie. The Free Cinema group had oered up, in a spirit of
opposition, simple fragments of daily reality, modest lm essays on things
close to common experience. They wanted to use lm as a witness of
this reality, a testimonial that brought a living document to the screen.
But Free Cinema is only one way of doing this, warned Alea. It was a
certain style, characterized by great mobility and agility, in which the
lmmaker took up position as a spectator and lmed fragments of reality
spontaneously, as it unfolded, and without interfering in its unfolding.
Afterwards, the material took shape in the editing. Its strength was in
the way the lm thus liberated itself not only from various economic
and political obstacles, but also largely from the dead weight that the
normal processes of lm production have to suer. If, he said, a certain
degree of technical perfection has to be sacriced to achieve this, what
is returned to the audience by way of the invitation to engage with what
is on the screen is more important.
Here Alea is one of the rst to express what soon became one of
icaics foremost criteria: the conviction that a lmmakers sensitivity
to the audience is more important than the achievement of technical
mastery, since without it the greatest mastery is pointless. This is a dier-
ent emphasis from the Free Cinema directors themselves, who were
more concerned with the personal artistic aspirations of the individual
director. Alea was unquestionably in favor of spontaneity and the rewards
of the feeling of creative freedom, but he thought that this in itself was
not enough. You must not, he said, as a lmmaker, let spontaneity allow
you to forget that you are there behind a camera taking up the position
 188 The Documentary in the Revolution

of an artist or creator, and that every process of creation implies the

modication of the elements it employs, which in the way that this is
done gives it the lmmakers individual stamp. Not that this is anything
the Free Cinema directors would have denied. On the contrary, this
individual stamp was what they were aiming for. But when cultural at-
titudes are translated from the great metropolis to the artists cafs of
peripheral capitals, their character changes. And what was important to
emphasize in Havana at that moment was that artistic creation pre-
supposes, as Alea put it, an attitude in the face of reality that is not
impartial. Artistic creation involves judgment, and all attempts to por-
tray reality while avoiding judgment on it are dud. Sometimes this leads
to half-truths, which can be more immoral than a complete lie. Hence
Aleas conclusionprophetic of the problem about P.M.that one
should not think that Free Cinema is the new cinema. . . . Free Cinema
is only a new step in a particular direction, of great value but with great
dangers.

Although its example was still alive, Free Cinema as a historical phenom-
enon was already over when Alea wrote these lines. It was superseded by
cinma vrit and direct cinema, which in certain ways it anticipated.
These movements began more or less simultaneously on both sides of
the Atlantic. In France, a highly skilled camera engineer, Andr Coutant,
introduced the enthnographic lmmaker Jean Rouch to a camera that
had been developed for use in military space satellites for purposes of
surveillance by the Paris company clair, for which Coutant worked.
Coutant knew that Rouch would nd more liberating uses for it, espe-
cially since it could be paired with one of the new portable tape recorders
that could be swung on the shoulder. Rouch had spent ten years making
remarkable documentaries in a handheld camera style he had evolved
for himself, but he had been limited by the impossibility of shooting
them with synchronous sound because available sound equipment, de-
signed to meet studio needs, restricted the mobility of the camera. You
needed a truck and crew to shoot sound on location. Even if this had
been possible in ethnographic settings, for Rouch it defeated the pur-
pose of making a lm at all, since to show anything ethnographically
authentic you had to be able to shoot around your subject and not do
what they did in studios: move things around in a way that suited the
camera (and the lights and the microphones). The new equipment
 The Documentary in the Revolution 189

allowed the development of a distinct and appropriate camera style,

which is a necessary feature of direct cinema, just as the elaboration of a
new sense of screen space was a necessary part of neorealism. Clearly,
the two things are not unrelated.
In the United States, the English-born Richard Leacock felt a similar
frustration to Rouchs. Leacock mistrusted what he called the con-
trolled lm, the lm that re-created what a director thought a situation
should be even in documentary, either because of the impossibility of
shooting it as it was, or because a director like Flaherty (he had worked
as Flahertys cameraman on Louisiana Story in 1948) had a penchant,
even a air, for it. And its true: this practice had come largely to negate
the original idea of documentary.
It was said that the new style fetishized the camera, in the form of the
unsteadiness of handheld shooting, the jerky zooms and going-in-and-
out-of-focus that became its trademarkwobblyscope, as the older
generation of lm cameramen in British television called it (they were
all men). The truth is, of course, that it was in the studios that the cam-
era was treated like a fetish, a veritable idol, everything laid at its feet
and arranged for its convenience. Yet a certain fetishization did take
place in direct cinema. At the start, you got wobblyscope because camera-
men were having to relearn their craft, and to begin with they were still
clumsy. Then some of them began to cultivate the eects of inexperi-
enced handheld shooting for their own sake, because you could feel the
activity of the person behind the camera in them, moving around within
the same space that the image within the viewnder is part of. But as
the skills of direct lming were extended, the persistence of such features
arguably became an unnecessary aectation.
Leacock has spoken, however, of how he became fascinated with
eects that arose when the situations he was lming in got out of con-
trol. He began to nd bits in the resulting lm that he thought extraor-
dinarily interesting: Not because they were clever or chic or anything,
but because they were true. They presented you with data to try and g-
ure out what the hell was really going on.3 This recalls something Walter
Benjamin explained about cinema. Film, he said,
has enriched our perception with methods which can be illustrated by
those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed
more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed
dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its
 190 The Documentary in the Revolution

course on the surface. Since The Psychopathology of Everyday Life things

have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had
heretofore oated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception.
For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also of acoustical, percep-
tion, the lm has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It
is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can
be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than
those presented in paintings or on the stage.4

To aim to work up this process of apperception has pretty clear polit-

ical implications, whether the lmmaker sees them or not. For Rouch,
this took on a particular form. His academic background schooled him
in both philosophical and instrinsic problems about observation. He
knew the observer had an eect on the observed that could never be
wholly eliminated, and that was more and other than what was regis-
tered by camera wobbles. For Rouch, the whole problematic of making
the lm had to become a central subject for it.
The lm that gave the term cinma vrit its currency is the lm that
gave paradigmatic expression to this concern. Rouch used the term, a
translation of Dziga Vertovs kino-pravda (lm truth), in the subtitle of
Chronique dun t, which he made in 1960 with the sociologist Edgar
Morin and the French-Canadian cameraman Michel Brault. Ninety
minutes long, the lm is a study of the strange tribe that lives in Paris.
What emerges, however, is rather dierent from the kind of thing Vertov
meant. Chronique dun t is not so much a dynamic dialectical visual
inquiry as an unscripted psychodrama enacted by real persons that is
called into play by the camera itself. The lm proceeds in a strange way
to create its own reality, which only exists because it is the result of the
lmmakers activity, the reality of a situation that the camera provokes
but that isnt conventional ction. At the end, Morin and Rouch are
seen pacing the halls of the Paris anthropology museum, the Muse de
lHomme, questioning themselves about the rights and wrongs of prob-
ing someones emotional crisis, or whether anothers account of war-
time deportation was not perhaps dramatized for the camera. At the
door of the museum, Rouch asks Morin what he thinks. He replies, I
think were in trouble. The lms ends.
Why they were in trouble emerges from the contradiction in the
appeal they made to Vertov. Vertov had not regarded even the most
 The Documentary in the Revolution 191

directly lmed scene as in itself cinematic truth. Like the other early
Soviet lmmakers, he had emphasized the importance of montage, which
he interpreted not simply as a process of cutting apart and putting back
together, but as a fundamental principle of lm art that operates on
several levels: it applies to the selection of the theme, to its execution,
and then to the actual editing of the lm. He declared that it is not
enough to show bits of truth on the screen, separate frames of truth,
but that these frames must be thematically organized so that the whole
is also truth.5
For the new documentarists, however, editing was a necessary evil, to
be minimized not only through the greater uidity of the camera but
also by respecting the order of events as lmed, on the grounds that any
other order would be subjective. In the discourse surrounding direct
cinema, as one commentator puts it, editing (montage) is cast as the
villain of cinemas quest for the holy grailregarded as a distortion, a
formalist cul-de-sac.6 The Cubans were highly suspicious of such
dogma. They did not, at the time of the Revolution, know the work of
Vertov, but they quickly rediscovered his principles. Perhaps this is not
surprising. Their own explanation is that these principles come from
the creative and dialectical application of Marxist thinking to cinema
within the context and process of a revolution. This is surely how Alea
arrived at the view he expressed in his Free Cinema article, that because
reality is forever changing, it presents an innite number of aspects with
their own multiple antecedents, which must somehow be taken into ac-
count. Such thinking is also entirely congruent with criticisms that
came to be made of cinma vrit by independent Marxist thinkers in
Europe, such as the remarks Lucien Goldmann directed at Chronique
dun t: as a sociological piece of work, he explained, Chronique dun
t has serious limitations, though it did, he commented, go far enough
in its chosen method to imply a justied criticism of the very large
number of imaginative works which lose all contact with reality while
at the same time posing as realist. However,

the root of Morin and Rouchs preoccupations was precisely to avoid the
arbitrary, to grasp actual reality, to get the truth. But precisely at this
point, we fear that they have come up against a major methodological
diculty which was long since pointed out in the methodological works
of Hegel and Marx: when its a question of human realities, the truth is
 192 The Documentary in the Revolution

never immediate, and anything which is immediate remains abstract

and, for that very reason, stained by inexactitude as long as it is not
inserted into the whole by a number of more or less large and complex
mediations.7
The lm is really a kind of group therapy, its characters entering into
its unconventional ction in the name of a special kind of truth, with
the self-consciousness of a very particular cultural and intellectual world.
This is where it gets the idea of self-reference from, like the incorporation
of the responses of its self-searching participants. Who were they, then?
One was a young student who began a few years later to get deeply
involved in the Cuban Revolution and the liberation struggles of Latin
America, who in the lm is just called Rgis. In 1967, imprisoned in
Bolivia as an associate of Che Guevara, Rgis Debray recorded his mem-
ory of those days: With the academic year measuring out our seasons
and weeks, he wrote in his Prison Writings,
we could stroll around the streets of the Latin Quarter with nothing to
worry about except ourselves and our salvation . . . we roamed about
the Sorbonne in groups, as we met to found a magazine, or work out
a manifesto, or drink a beer . . . we were the hopeless prey of eroticism,
little in-groups, literary journalism and the cinmathque. . . . We also
learnt, for we were good pupils, that the sirens of ideological error are
always singing, on the cinema screen, in novels and in the street, and
that few scholars are wise enough to close their ears fully to them. So,
to save us from ourselves, we were taught to mistrust our own credulity
and our enthusiasms, and to lay in a supply of ear-plugs as a protection.8
The very achievement of Chronique dun t in communicating this
worldfrom the professors point of viewalso made it a completely
unlikely model for the critical but enthusiastic cinema the Cubans
needed, with or without the appropriate gear, and if the techniques it
employed would only later be incorporated into the armory of Cuban
documentary style, this is because there were other matters to be worked
through rst.

The preoccupations of Jean Rouch were also remote from the concerns
of the Anglo-Saxon North Americans. The year after Chronique dun
t, Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles went down to Cubapracti-
cally the rst of many lmmakers from the metropolis to do soto
shoot sequences for Yanki No!, a lm on Latin American attitudes toward
the United States for abc television. But they too got into trouble, and
 The Documentary in the Revolution 193

the lm they made shows how easily ideological compromise was able
to swallow up the new principles. Yanki No! allowed people abroad to
hear Fidel Castro speaking for the rst time, but, bowing to the demands
of television for which it was made, it overlaid a commentary that undid
much of what the lmmakers intended: over shots of people on their
way to a rally, the narrator intones Now the Revolution is going to
stage a show; and about Fidel: Fidel Castro, who looks like a raving
madman to North Americans, is seen by Latin Americans as a sort of
messiah. Now you will see him at his messianic best.
In fairness, Leacock was both an old Communist and a member of
the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that sprang up in 1959 within the
emerging New Left in the United States. (The left-wing journalist K. S.
Karol shared a table with him at the Fair Play for Cuba meeting on the
eve of Fidels UN address in 1960, where they met Fidel and the rest of
the Cuban delegation.9 Henri Cartier-Bresson was there and took pho-
tographs.) But the lm is caught up by the limitations of the radical lib-
eral ideology that dominated this movement, and led the lmmakers to
compromise in the interests of getting the lm on television. This is
not to say they necessarily knew what the eect would beit was early
days for such endeavorsbut such experiences taught them to hate
television.10
It was a Frenchman, Chris Marker, who made the lm the Cubans
themselves regarded at the time as the best documentary about the Revo-
lution: Cuba S!. The title alone spells out the dierence from Leacocks
lm. Where the latter aimed to shock the audience into realizing the
way Washington policies were estranging what was previously thought
to be a docile country, Marker identied completely with the Cubans
and made a celebratory lm. Shot rapidly in January 1961, he wrote in
the preface to the published script, during the rst period of alert (you
knowat the time when the majority of French papers were hooting
over Fidels paranoia in imagining himself threatened with invasion), it
aims at communicating, if not the experience, at least the vibrations,
the rhythms of a revolution that will one day perhaps be held to be the
decisive moment of a whole era of contemporary history.11

Cuba became a subject of great interest to practitioners of the new doc-

umentary because the whole circumstance of the Revolution made a
great deal much more directly available to the camera than was normal
 194 The Documentary in the Revolution

elsewhere. And because it was a symbol of the throwing o of shackles,

which was part of the spirit of the new documentary too. For the Cubans
themselves, however, it was not primarily a matter of style or technique.
Alfredo Guevara wrote in Cine Cubano in 1960, a couple of months be-
fore Aleas Free Cinema article, about a process of discovery that began
with two lms by Julio Garca Espinosa, Sexto aniversario (Sixth an-
niversary) and Un ao de libertad (A year of freedom).12 Both of them,
because of the speed of change of events, had to be reelaborated during
editing. The second, said Guevara, was the more dicult to make, be-
cause it used newsreel and archive footage that was very poor in narrative
quality. But by reworking it, they found a narrative method for the lm
that took them away from the bare chronology of the old propaganda
material they were using. This way they managed to construct a certain
historical understanding of the events portrayed. They made their mini-
mal resources work. How had this been possible? asked Guevara. Exper-
tise at the editing table? The use they made of dissolves and shock cuts?
No, it was the conception of events that theyd had to get right, in order
to give the editing technique directionin this case, the technique of
montage.
Guevaras attitude here is the twin of Aleas and implies the same crit-
icisms of direct cinema. This way of treating material is strictly anath-
ema in direct cinema, not simply because of the prohibition on inter-
fering, but because direct cinema avoids the use of found material.
Guevara believes, however, that you need a critical conception of events
to make a lm, the kind that is summoned when you rework material,
looking for a way to turn it inside out to nd what was previously hid-
den within it. This makes you realize that appearances are liable to be
both truthful and deceptive at the same time; and that therefore the only
guarantee of cinematic truth lies beyond the lens. Better to violate aes-
thetic theories, felt the Cubans, in order to make the subject more intel-
ligible, because truth is always served by its more eective communica-
tion, and communication is part of the political purpose of the lm.
What is common to the approaches of Cuban documentary and direct
cinema, cinma vrit, is the aim of liberating documentary from the
conventions of commercial lm, such as insistent but insensitive back-
ground music, swish editing based on misplaced codes of ctional nar-
rative, the alienation and paternalism of the commentary (not that the
 The Documentary in the Revolution 195

early icaic documentaries entirely avoid these ills), and the conviction
that reality is not so elusive that it cannot be induced to show itself.
Crucially, there was also the aim of returning documentary to the center
of attention in cinemain which by the end of the 1960s the Cubans
had succeeded as no other cinema has done, with feature-length docu-
mentaries becoming regular fare in Cuban cinemas. But the way the
Cubans arrived at this position strongly suggests that even if they had
had the same technical resources as in the metropolis, they would still
not have developed a documentary cinema substantially dierent from
the one they did. They had good reasons for rejecting dogmatic or ex-
treme versions of any style or aesthetic. Rouchs way of thinking was
unappealing to them because with him, under the guise of objective
investigation, there lurked a certain individualistic subjectivism. Rouch
once expressed the notion that the best result of further technical
advance would be to let the lmmaker work completely alone; but
this dream of realizing what the French critic Astruc called the camra-
stylo (camera-pen) amounts to little more than saddling the lmmaker
with the traditional role of the author. In Cuba, the whole problem
was how to break down the isolation of the author, not how to bring
the lmmaker to approximate to it. What does this isolation have to
do with revolutionary politics and icaics concern to foster collective
consciousness?
Or take the idea of the camera obtruding as little as possible. Here
the Cubans saw a failure in dialectical reasoning. They also suspected
the need for subterfuge. They were not themselves primarily interested
in people forgetting the presence of the camera in order to see them as
they really were (even if the results could be very interesting): they
wanted people to accept the presence of the camera and of the lm-
makers, in order that they should open up and share their experience,
through them, with others. What this needed was not better technology
to make lms with, but better conscience in making them.
Among the pioneers of direct cinema, those the Cubans would have
found most sympathetic were the French Canadians, for their situation
as members of a national minority living under the cultural as well as
the political hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon empire was the closest to
the situation the Cubans were beginning to leave behind. When we try
to nd out what the problems of our culture mean, said Gilles Groulx,
 196 The Documentary in the Revolution

we become aware that our uneasiness is not artistic but social: we

might call it the attempt to express the man born in this country.13
This could be a Cuban speaking.

The fact is that icaic was far more disposed to learn about documentary
from the veteran socialist lmmaker Joris Ivens. There is nothing sur-
prising about Ivenss presence in Cuba, said Cine Cubano in November
1960 (the issue before Aleas Free Cinema piece) of Ivenss visit earlier
that year. Wherever theres a country struggling for its freedom, a people
trying to liquidate the old structures and forge a sane and healthy future
where man can nd and reclaim his dignity, Ivens will be present. And
as a creator, not a tourist.14 Ivens, whose principal lms had been pro-
hibited in West Germany, France, and Italy, who had lmed in Spain
during the civil war, in China during the war against the Japanese
invader, who had voiced a cry of alarm over the Dutch governments
intentions against the young Indonesian republic at the end of the Sec-
ond World War and thus become an undesirable in his native country,
Ivens represented an ideal the Cubans could readily identify withthe
participant witness who wielded the camera with the precision of a rie.
They invited him not just to make a lm about the Revolution but also,
as he modestly describes it himself, to impart his experience of making
lms under dicult conditions.15
Ivens began immediately upon arrival to give talks and hold discus-
sions with his hosts on the theory and practice of militant cinema, but
it was primarily through making a pair of lms with Cuban crews that
his pedagogic air took eect. The idea for the rst, Carnet de viaje
(Travel notebook), arose from discussion in the rst few days of his visit
about the problem of how a foreign lmmaker, however proven a mili-
tant, could possibly lm The Revolution when he had only just arrived.
(Ivens had been to Cuba once before, in 1937, with Hemingway, one of
his collaborators on the Spanish civil war lm, but for present purposes
that didnt count.) The idea for the lm was that in order to get to know
the Revolution he would have to see what was going on in dierent
places around the island; the trip would become the itinerary of the lm.
The simplest of ideas; perhaps only a master like Ivens could bring it o.
The second lm, Cuba pueblo armado (Cuba, a people armed), was
made in response to a request by Fidel, whom Ivens met on his second
evening in Havana. When Ivens and his crew reached the region of
 The Documentary in the Revolution 197

Escambray in the center of the island, Fidel called to ask if they could
interrupt the shooting of the lm that was in progress in order to make
a lm there of the Peoples Militia, who were engaged in an oensive
against counterrevolutionary bands. Fidel explained, said Ivens, that the
operation could have been carried out rather more quickly by the Rebel
Army but it had purposely been given to the Militia. The Militia com-
mander in the area was not too keen on having to cope with a lm crew
and it fell to their production manager, Sal Yeln, to deal with the prob-
lem. Yeln, who subsequently became, until his death in 1977, what Ivens
aectionately called icaics foreign minister, asked the commander to
call Havana. The next day his attitude had changed completelynot
because he had been given some order from on high but because it had
been explained to him why Ivens had been asked to make such a lm.
He went up to Ivens saying, Why didnt you tell me you lmed the
wars in Spain and China?
On his second visit to Cuba the following year, while he worked at
icaic as an adviser and assessor, helping to sort out the teething prob-
lems of the new Institute, Ivens was again called on because of his expe-
rience in lming military conict to carry out a special task. He was
approached by Osmani Cienfuegos (brother of Camilo) to undertake
the training of military cameramen. With the knowledge that an invasion
was due, the Cubans realized the importance of being able to lm such
an eventuality. They also realized it was a task beyond the capacity of
icaic, though icaic would obviously contribute. A remote hacienda
previously belonging to an uncle of Batistas was chosen as the site of
the school, which was naturally placed under tight military security:
Ivens went there in secret (it was said hed gone elsewhere in Latin Amer-
ica). Faced with the problem of training fty or sixty students, some
peasants, some workers, very few of them with even an amateur photog-
raphers knowledge, Ivens asked for six months. Impossible, said Fidel,
we need you to do the job in a month: Youll see, our people work day
and night. But Ivens managed to get a concession from him and they
agreed upon two.
The real diculty was how to teach without cameras. Ivens got hold
of an old Eyemo from icaic and found a carpenter among the students
who undertook to make models of it out of wood; these were weighted
so as to give the feel of the real thing. He conducted exercises with these
models, and in the absence of real lm to show results, each student had
 198 The Documentary in the Revolution

to recount to the others the pictures he had pretendedly taken. Ivens

explained to them the way he had lmed in the Spanish civil war and
the students constructed a model of the battle in question and worked
out how the lming could have been improved. One result was that the
Rebel Army thus reentered the arena of Cuban cinema. In subsequent
years, the Cuban armed forces have not only made their own instruc-
tional lms but have also made a signicant contribution to Cuban
documentary in collaboration with icaic in the shape of a number of
frontline reports on liberation struggles in Africa.
Ivens spoke to Cine Cubano at the end of his rst visit about what he
had seen in Cuba. It is not dicult to see why his approach was readily
appreciated:
Among the men and women who represent the Cuban Revolution you
can see the desire to manifest clearly the dignity and meaning of the idea
theyre defending. . . . I saw this example of dignityand it impressed
menot only in the struggle of defense but also in places of work. In
cooperatives, in industrial centers, you noticed the decision that the
whole people put into constructing their own destiny. If I can be allowed
to oer young Cuban lmmakers any advice, I would say that this
represents the best lmic lesson for them. They should forget about the
problems of technique and style. They will acquire these things with
time. The important thing for now is to let life into the studios and
not become bureaucrats of the camera. Film quickly and as directly as
possible everything thats going on. To accumulate burning-hot direct
material can be considered the best way to get to a cinema with national
characteristics.16
Direct lming comes into this not as a normative stylistic principle
Ivens says, dont worry about questions of stylebut as a way of making
the lmmaker answerable to the ideals of the Revolution as they are lived
out by those around them. As icaic developed, this ideathough
doubtless Ivens wasnt its only sourcebecame the linchpin of its system
of apprenticeship in which all directors in icaic would be required to
serve in either documentary or newsreel work.
One of the members of Ivenss lm crew in Cuba wrote a diary of the
lming for Cine Cubano. The rst thing Ivens taught them was how to
look afresh at their own countryside. The Cuban countryside is a great
problem for the cinematographer, wrote Jos Massip:
This green which is so beautiful to the human eye is not so to the
mechanical eye of the photographic lens. With black-and-white lm,
 The Documentary in the Revolution 199

the dierent shades of green are lost in a dark and undierentiated

mass. This means, for example, that if the dramatic quality of an action
is accentuated in nature by the countryside behind it, this emphasis will
be considerably reduced on the screen.
The solution to this problem probably consists in nding an appro-
priate relationship between the landscape and the sky. Cubas sky could
be the salvation of its countryside. Ivens could not remember a sky to
compare with it. Its astonishingly rich plasticity comes not only from its
marvelous shade of blue, but above all from the extraordinarily varied
shapes of its clouds. The sky, wisely included in the composition, can
cancel the betrayal of the green.17

Massip goes on to recount lessons Ivens taught in how to photograph

things so as to suggest the process of change; the importance of using
the bottom third of the frame, the forgotten area in the pictorial com-
position of the lm image; how to capture special aspects, moments,
and relationships in a scene. The cameraman Ramn Surez added a
note that mentioned, among other things, the importance Ivens placed
on faces. Here Ivens was passing on a lesson he himself had learned
from Russian workers when he rst visited the Soviet Union in 1930.
When he showed them his avant-garde lm Rain, It seemed to them,
he wrote in his autobiography,

that I had fallen in love with reections and textures. They said Rain
showed too little of human reactions and concentrated too much on
objects. One challenging remark wasWhy are you afraid of faces? If
you could look at a face with the same frankness with which you look
at a raindrop you would be wonderful. This reaction made a deeper
impression on me than when audiences compared the lighting and
composition in Rain with that in Dutch genre painting.18

Still, from what he taught the Cubans, Ivens had clearly not allowed
himself to forget that lighting and composition were of primary impor-
tance, only as means, not ends. In a third article, Jorge Fraga noted how
Ivens did not follow a rigid work schedule but instead often lmed
intuitively, grasping passing moments. He reenacted things only if it
was necessary not to lose a shot or because it was the only way to get the
image in question, and then he always did it in the simplest way possible.
Fraga also noted Ivenss constant awareness that the phrases of mon-
tage, the expressive molds of lm language, are historically condi-
tioned aesthetic categories, and that he preferred spontaneity to irrupt
 200 The Documentary in the Revolution

into the frame rather than adhering to classical rules of composition;

and that he kept his camera almost always in movement.
These reports in Cine Cubano were one of the means adopted in icaic
to transmit the lessons learned by those chosen to work with Ivens to
the others. A later issue of the magazine includes a transcript of a round-
table discussion on Ivenss work, which was another such means. icaic
organized itself from the outset to provide an environment of a kind to
facilitate the collective assimilation of experience. This work is carried
on at two levels, for Cine Cubano and the Cinemateca reached the broad
acionado public, while there were also internal publications and icaics
in-house cine debates, in which all their own productions and selected
foreign lms were discussed among a range of production workers
directors, producers, editors, camera people, and so on. The oral history
of icaic is in these debates, and more, for just as Cine Cubano is a
journal not only of Cuban cinema but of the whole New Latin American
Cinema movement, so too other Latin American lmmakers, both visi-
tors and exiles to whom icaic gave a home, took their places in these
debates as respected comrades. Even the visiting lm critic researching
the history of Cuban cinema would be invited to participate, to discover
a dialogue that was conducted at a high and wide-ranging level, without
neglect of detail and without shunning either polemic or stringent crit-
icism. These debates, which date right back to the early years, have
helped to forge the sense of collectivity in icaic and provide a means
of mutual instruction.
Many of Ivenss practical lessons were, by these means, pretty rapidly
and eectively disseminated, but it is also clear that the most important
lessons icaic drew from Ivens were human rather than technical. The
human content of Ivenss example has been well summed up by Tom
Waugh in an excellent account of the veteran lmmakers two Cuban
lms. He mentions the lming of a conversation between two militia-
men guarding a bridge that appears in Cuba pueblo armado:

At the time of the shoot, the crew were struck not only by Ivens instinc-
tual recognition of a good scene and of natural actors but also of the
way in which he was able to make the two subjects feel comfortable
and trustful with regard to the camera. . . . His . . . secret for bringing out
the natural actors in such subjects was his authentic respect for them,
his involvement with them as human beings rather than as subjects.
 The Documentary in the Revolution 201

To this eect, Jorge Fraga remembered a heated argument between

Ivens and a peasant that he at rst found shocking because of the
obvious social disadvantage of the latter. But he suddenly realized that
it was rather a total absence of paternalism and sentimentality that was
responsible for Ivens attitude, his assumption of the peasants equality
despite social and cultural barriers. Ivens attitude was essential to the
active collaboration between artist and subject in his work, which the
Cubans greatly admired, a clear challenge for Havana intellectuals such
as Fraga and Massip. The triumph of Ivens approach came when he
attempted to persuade captured counter-revolutionaries to re-enact
their night-time surrender. . . . The prisoners, no doubt bewildered by
the Communists generous treatment, consented and can be seen in the
lm emerging from the jungle, hands above their heads.19

Historia de una batalla (Story of a battle), by a director who had no

direct contact with Ivens, Manuel Octavio Gmez, shows how wide-
spread Ivenss inuence was and how much he helped icaic nd its
feet. The battle in Gmezs lm is the literacy campaign. The metaphor
of the title is not an invention of the lm but is taken from the cam-
paign itself, for the sheer scale of the undertakingto eliminate in a
matter of months an illiteracy rate that at its highest in the countryside
approached 43 percentrequired a quasi-military form of organiza-
tion, though not, as we can see from the lm, one that was particularly
militaristic.
The political import of the campaign was established at the outset
when a young volunteer teacher was assassinated by counterrevolution-
aries. A few days later, Castro announced that schools would close on
April 15 and an army of one hundred thousand literacy workers aged
thirteen and over would set out to live, work, and learn with the poor
and humble of the land. It is the image of these children leaving for the
countryside in their brigades (while adult literacy workers took on the
job in the cities) that opens the lm and sets the tone. The lm concen-
trates on the role of the children not only because it was their participa-
tion that provided the most graphic possibilities, but also because the
experience that challenged them was the very stu of revolutionary so-
cial change. The encounter of city children, mostly middle-class, with
peasant life and values would be a learning experience for them as well,
far beyond the immediate purpose of the campaign. It was a challenge
too to their parents to let their childrengirls as well as boysleave
 202 The Documentary in the Revolution

the safety and comfort of their homes to spend weeks and months with
strangers in possibly dangerous circumstances. Indeed, toward the end
of the campaign there were further assassinations of brigadistas (brigade
members) by counterrevolutionaries, to which Fidel replied by declar-
ing that the revolutionary response to the attempt to sow terror among
the families of the brigadistas was to refuse to call home a single one of
them. But this was only the most dramatic of the dangers. The scenes in
the lm of mothers tearful as their children depart evoke their trepida-
tion as they steel themselves to let the Revolution shatter the mores of
the past. In fact, it was through participation in the campaign that a
whole generation of children was able to join the revolutionary process
with which they so eagerly wanted to identify. Richard Fagen calls the
experience a revolutionary rite of passage, their rst opportunity to
prove that they were fully-edged revolutionaries.20
unesco was impressed when it made an independent evaluation of
the success of the campaign the following year. (The illiteracy rate had
been reduced to the level of a metropolitan country.) This lm, how-
ever, is not an empirically evaluative report. The campaign was a testing
ground for many of the ideas that were later to be incorporated into the
revolutionary style of governance through mass participation, and it
became an essential step in a process of civic education that brought
about not only literacy but political awareness, a deeper understanding
of national problems, a new concept of citizenship and its rights and
responsibilities, a new willingness to work for the transformation of the
old society. The lm is a celebration of all this, which, through celebrat-
ing it, becomes part of it. Hence the interweaving in the lm of mass
demonstrations, the speech by Che Guevara at the UN, and the events
of the Bay of Pigs, images that are presented not as background but as
the expression of the play of social forces among which the literacy cam-
paign is another.
The Peruvian critic Mario Tejada, observing that the early icaic doc-
umentary directors lacked sucient dominion over lmic language to
match the magnitude of the subjects they lmed, singles out this lm
(together with Muerte al invasor [Death to the invader], a report on the
Bay of Pigs by Alea and lvarez) for achieving an epic quality.21 Yet, at
the same time, Gmez personalizes his subject in the manner that was
taught by Ivens, by picking out individually signicant details within
the overall scene in front of the camera. It isnt just the generalized anx-
 The Documentary in the Revolution 203

iety of mothers as their children depart, and the joy of the reunion when
they return, but the particular woman searching a parade of brigadistas
for her child somewhere in the middle of it, or the camera following a
brigadista home to lm the doorstep embrace. The inuence of Ivens is
also to be felt in the lyrical-poetic commentary. Ivens has made this
kind of commentary into something of a ne art, in lms like La Seine a
recontr Paris (1957), which employs a poem by Jacques Prvert, or . . .
Valparaiso (1963) with its commentary by Chris Marker.

The rapid expansion of icaics documentary output, from four lms

in 1959 to twenty-one the following year and forty in 1965, makes it a
hopeless task, because of the sheer volume of production involved, to
attempt to survey these lms individually without looking for a way to
categorize them. Inspection of the catalog with this aim yields half a
dozen or so main thematic categories, some with internal subdivisions.
The two largest groups are:
rst, lms on the revolutionary process, including mobilizations,
struggle against the counterrevolution, social transformations, political
subjects proper, and the history of the Revolution;
second, didactic lms: this covers an enormous range of topics, from
articial respiration to the domestic ea, the origins of the human
species, surgical operations, genetics, agricultural methods, hygiene,
machine maintenance, and so on. These are followed by:
third, another large group of lms dealing with cultural and artistic
subjects: music and ballet, architecture, painting, handicrafts, and so on;
a fourth group comprising social history and the observation of
Cuban character and social life, subjects that are frequently related to
the third group;
fth, a group of lms related to the rst category, which treat of the
revolutionary critique of capitalism and imperialism, of international
solidarity and the principles of internationalism, including coverage of
liberation wars;
sixth, a group of lms on the subject of women; and
seventh, sport.
A group of students in Havana, using icaics own Cuban-assembled
computer, analyzed the institutes documentary output over the years
1959 to 1982. Their ndings were reported by Mario Piedra in Cine
Cubano.22 Using thirty-three thematic categories divided into nine broad
 204 The Documentary in the Revolution

groups, they found, for example, that documentaries on working-class

themes, the largest group, represented 24.27 percent of the output, those
on artistic culture, 20.38 percent. The problem with this kind of ap-
proach is that it neither takes account of the stylistic variety of the lms
nor does it have any way of dealing with lms that belong to more than
one thematic category. A lm like Jos Massips Historia de un ballet
(Story of a ballet, 1962) is about artistic culture but it has signicant
overtones of social history. Nor is it just a matter of viewing the lm
and deciding which is the correct emphasis. It is partly a conceptual
problem. Is an instructional lm on prenatal care, like Atencin prenatal
(Prenatal care) directed by Sara Gmez in 1972, to be classied as a didac-
tic lm or under the heading of women?
There is another consideration too: the themes that are less often
treated are not necessarily less important. Films themselves are of dier-
ent weight. A major lm on a given subject may have more eect than
half a dozen lms with more modest intentthough also, a wholly suc-
cessful modest lm might go further than a botched major one. Both
things have occurred in Cuba. Films dealing directly with the need to
promote the equality of women and advance their position have been
relatively few, but several have been substantial lms that in their mo-
ment received considerable attention, like Octavio Cortzars Con las
mujeres cubanas (With Cuban women, 1974). At the same time, one of
the most signicant Cuban documentaries of all, not because it attracted
attention immediately but because its reputation and inuence devel-
oped over a period of years, is a six-minute montage experiment made
by Santiago lvarez in 1965, called Now.
And then there is the question of what a didactic lm actually is.
There is a sense in which, within a set of terms referring to subject areas,
the category is anomalous, for it delimits not so much subject as treat-
ment. In fact, it is an umbrella term that covers a diverse range of sub-
jects and refers to the functional purpose of the lm. It really belongs,
as a category, to a dierent set of terms altogether, the set that identies,
rather than subject, the intention with which the lm is made. There is
indeed a set of terms of this kind available, it doesnt have to be invented.
It does not provide a systematic scheme of classication any more than
do subject headings, but it represents the way documentary is thought
of in Latin America itself, because it arises directly from the conditions
under which lmmakers at the receiving end of imperialism have to
 The Documentary in the Revolution 205

operate. These terms, of which didactic cinema (cine didctico) is one,

are far more aesthetically compelling than what has been suggested so
far. Other categories include:

cine testimoniothe testimonial lm;

cine denunciathe lm of denunciation;
cine encuestathe lm of inquiry, investigative documentary;
cine rescatethe lm of historical recovery;
cine celebrativocelebratory cinema;
cine ensayothe lm essay;
cine reportajereportage, not quite the same as investigative lm but
overlapping with it;
and, above all, cine militante or combatethe militant lm or lm of
combat par excellence.

This list is not exhaustive or denitive and there is no single source

from which it is drawn. They are only the most frequently used of a
series of terms that occur across the whole range of Cuban and radical
Latin American lm writings, that is to say, the writings that belong to
the same movement as the lms themselves, which express its preoccu-
pations and objectives. They can be found in lm journals from several
countries, including Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and Mexico, as well as Cuba:
Hablemos de Cine, Cine al da, Primer Plano, Octubre, and Cine Cubano,
respectively, to cite only the most important of them. The distinctive
feature of all the terms listed is precisely their intentional character.
They indicate a variety of purposes: to teach, to oer testimony, to de-
nounce, to investigate, to bring history alive, to celebrate revolutionary
achievement, to provide space for reection, to report, to express soli-
darity, to militate for a cause. These are all needs of revolutionary strug-
gle, both before and after the conquest of power (which only goes to
show that the conquest of power doesnt divide things into before and
after in the clear-cut way that is often supposed, in the mass media, in
the careless thinking of daily life, and in what Sartre called lazy Marx-
ism). The only dierence is that after the conquest of power the condi-
tions qualitatively change.
Quite likely all of this is what an unsympathetic critic from the
metropolis would call propaganda. But then you have to understand
not what propaganda is supposed to be, but what it is capable of becom-
ing. Bourgeois ideologies have always equated propaganda with mere
rhetoric, the selective use of evidence to persuade, oras a Cambridge
 206 The Documentary in the Revolution

professor once put ita branch of the art of lying which consists in
very nearly deceiving your friends while not quite deceiving your ene-
mies. The purposes of propaganda are usually considered incompatible
with what is supposed to be didactic and vice versaas if the contents
of formal education were sacrosanct, indubitable, and objectively true.
Every revolutionary aesthetic nds this a false and mendacious antinomy.
There is a tradition in revolutionary aesthetics that takes the classical
concept of rhetoric as the practical art of persuasion much more seri-
ously. (It is not for using rhetoric that advertising, commercial propa-
ganda, is to be condemned, but for the way it is used, and to what ends.)
Propaganda is the creative use of demonstration and example to teach
revolutionary principles, and of dialectical argument to mobilize intelli-
gence toward self-liberation (and if it isnt, it wont be eective for revo-
lutionary purposes). It seeks, and when it hits its target it gets, an active,
not a passive, response from the spectator. Revolutionary cinema, accord-
ing to the Argentinian lmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,
does not illustrate, document or establish a situation passively; it at-
tempts instead to intervene in that situation as a way of providing im-
petus towards its correction. This is one of the central assertions of the
essay they wrote about the experience of making the epic La hora de los
hornos (The hour of the furnaces) in the mid-1960s, which they called
Hacia un tercer cine (Towards a third cinema).23 There is obviously a
didactic element in this, but there is a dierence: the aim of teaching is
not immediately to inspire action, but to impart the means for the ac-
quisition of more and better knowledge upon which action may be
premised. Accordingly, there is a dierence in revolutionary aesthetics
too, from the practical point of view, between the propaganda and the
didactic lm.
La hora de los hornos is a lm from a radical Peronist position from
which the Cubans were politically distant, but the essay in which Solanas
and Getino analyzed the functions of revolutionary cinema represents a
stage of thinking within the new cinema of Latin America as a move-
ment that bears a strong relationship to where the Cubans had reached in
their own development. At an earlier stage, ten years earlier, when an-
other Argentinian, Fernando Birri, set up the lm school at the University
of Santa Fe, he had based the idea of the kind of cinema he was aiming
for on two main sources: Italian neorealism, and the idea of the social
documentary associated with John Grierson (whose teaching has some-
 The Documentary in the Revolution 207

times had a more radical eect in underdeveloped countries, anyway in

the long term, than in the country where it was born). These, however,
are precedents conventionally dominated by a naive realist aesthetic, and
it is not surprising to nd a few years later a Colombian lmmaker, Jorge
Silva, saying in an interview in the magazine Ojo al cine: At the incep-
tion of the militant lm movement, it was said that the essential thing
was simply to capture reality and nothing more, and to make reality
manifest. Afterwards, this formulation began to seem insucient.24
However, it was not as if Birri or anyone else involved meant these
paradigms to be accepted uncriticallyafter all, these models were still
European. The way Birri saw it, to apply the humanistic ideas behind
neorealism and the social documentary to the context of underdevelop-
ment immediately gave them a dialectical edge. In an interview in Cine
Cubano in 1963, he explained the function of the documentary in Latin
America by means of a play on the word underdevelopmentin Spanish,
subdesarrollo. In opposition to the false images of Latin American com-
mercial cinema, documentary was called to present an image of reality,
as it was and could not in all conscience otherwise be shown. It was thus
to bear critical witness and show that it was a sub-reality (sub-realidad),
that is to say, a reality suppressed and full of misfortune. In doing this,
says Birri, it denies it. It disowns it, judges it, criticizes it, dissects it: be-
cause it shows things as they irrefutably are, not as we would like them
to be (or how they would have us, in good or bad faith, believe that they
are). At the same time, As a balance to this function of negation, realist
cinema fullls another, one of arming the positive values in the soci-
ety: the values of the people, their reserves of strength, their labors,
their joys, their struggles, their dreamsthe same values, in fact, that
Brecht saw in the working people. Hence the motivation and the conse-
quence of the social documentary, says Birri, is knowledge of reality and
the grasp of awareness of ittoma de conciencia in Spanish, prise de
conscience in Frenchwhat Brecht wanted his theater to be. Birri sum-
marizes: Problematic. The change: from sub-life to life. In practical
terms: To place oneself in front of the reality with a camera and lm
this reality, lm it critically, lm underdevelopment with a popular optic.
Otherwise, you get a cinema that becomes the accomplice of underde-
velopment, which is to say, a sub-cinema (sub-cine, like subdesarrollo).25
This is not just a play on words. Birris thinking is informed by both
the philosophy and the theology of liberation in Latin America, with
 208 The Documentary in the Revolution

their emphasis on the process of concientizacin, particularly in the work

of the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire. Freires philosophical argu-
ments draw on both Hegelian philosophy and existentialism, as well as
on radical Christianity, but he is thoroughly materialist in his under-
standing of social reality; what he proposes is a philosophy of praxis. He
argues that self-knowledge is only possible because human beings are
able to gain objective distance from the world in which they live, and
only beings who can reect upon the fact that they are determined are
capable of freeing themselves.26 In consequence, they become capable
of acting upon the world to transform it, and through understanding
the signicance of human action upon objective reality, consciousness
takes on a critical and dialectical form. It is never, says Freire, a mere
reection of, but reection upon, material reality. In the same way, Birri
wants to say that the documentary lm is the production of images that
are not a simple reection of reality, but become, in the act of the lm,
a reection upon itrst by the lmmakers and then for the audience.
This is clearly not the position of a naive realist. But it is not the position
of a simple idealist either. It can best be called critical realism.
A lm may thus break through the culture of silenceFreires term for
the condition of ignorance, political powerlessness, lack of means of ex-
pression, backwardness, misery, dehumanization of the popular masses.
It can promote the recognition of the condition in which the people live,
and the way they are conditioned, and can sometimes even seem to give
them their voice. In this way it succors concientizacin, which is only vi-
able, says Freire, because human consciousness, although conditioned,
can recognize that it is conditioned. Hence the possibility of popular
consciousness whose emergence is at least, if not an overcoming of the
culture of silence, the entry of the masses into the historical process.
The power elite of the ruling classes are extremely sensitive to this.
Their own form of consciousness develops to try and keep pace. There
is always an intimate relationship between the ruler and the ruled (as in
Hegel between master and slave). In a structure of domination, the
silence of the popular masses would not exist but for the power elites
who silence them; nor would there be a power elite without the masses,
says Freire. Just as there is a moment of surprise among the masses
when they begin to see what they did not see before, there is a corre-
sponding surprise among the elites in power when they nd themselves
unmasked by the masses.
 The Documentary in the Revolution 209

The conscientious documentarist is bound to serve as a witness in

this process of twofold unveiling, as Freire calls it, which provokes anx-
ieties in both the masses and the power elite, and in doing so the very
idea of the social documentary is transformed; for, in this transitional
process, says Freire, contradictions come to the surface, and increasingly
provoke conict. The masses become anxious to overcome the silence
in which they seem always to have existed, the elites become more and
more anxious to maintain the status quo. As the lines of conict become
more sharply etched, the contradictions of dependency come into focus,
and groups of intellectuals and students, who themselves belong to the
privileged elite, seek to become engaged in social reality, critically reject-
ing imported schemata and prefabricated solutions. The arts gradually
cease to be the mere expression of the easy life of the auent bour-
geoisie and begin to nd their inspiration in the hard life of the people.
Poets begin to write about more than their lost loves, and even the theme
of lost love becomes less maudlin, more objective and lyrical. They speak
now of the eld hand and the worker not as abstract and metaphysical
concepts, but as concrete people with concrete lives. Since the mid-
1950s, lmmakers have been in the forefront of this process in Latin
America, beginning with the social documentary and moving on to ex-
plore a whole range of militant modes of lmmaking.

Take the idea of cine testimonio, testimonial cinema. In fact, there are
two distinct strands to this idea. One of them is well represented by the
Mexican documentarist Eduardo Maldonado, founder in 1969 of a group
that took the term itself as its name: Grupo Cine Testimonio. Cine testi-
monio, according to Maldonado, is concerned to put cinema at the ser-
vice of social groups that lack access to the means of mass communica-
tion, in order to make their point of view public. In the process, he says,
the lm collaborates in the concientizacin of the group concerned. At the
same time, the lmmakers awareness is directed toward the process of
the lm. The process of shooting becomes one of investigation and dis-
covery, which reaches, he believes, its nal and highest stage in the editing.
The lm thus embodies the aesthetic approach to concientizacin.27
The other strand to the idea of cine testimonio comes from a literary
source and is particularly strong in Cuba. The earliest paradigms are
found in the literatura de campaa, the campaign literature of the
nineteenth-century Cuban wars of independence: the memoirs, chron-
 210 The Documentary in the Revolution

icles, and diaries of Mximo Gmez, Cspedes, and others, including

Mart himself. They are the accounts of participants writing in the heat
of the events, with economy of style and aware of their necessarily par-
tial but privileged perspective. These are the same imperatives that Che
Guevara followed in his accounts of the Cuban revolutionary war in
the 1950s and the Bolivian campaign of the 1960s in which he died. A
striking thing about all these writings is that they always remain ex-
tremely personal. Hence, as the Cuban documentarist Vctor Casaus
observes, the elegance and melancholy of Cspedes, the outrage and
violent jottings of Gmez, the brilliance of Mart.28
In Cuba, Casaus continues, this literature was the origin of a genre
that took shape in the 1930s, in the new and imaginative journalism of
Pablo de la Torriente Brau (who died ghting in the Spanish civil war)
and Ral Roa (a historian who became one of the Revolutions distin-
guished elder gures). Pablo de la Torriente Braus Presidio modelo
(Model penitentiary), dealing with his experience as a political prisoner,
was an antecedent of testimonial writings by authors throughout Latin
America, including the Argentinian Rodolfo Walsh, the Salvadoran
Roque Dalton, and the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano. In Cuba itself, the
genre has further owered since the Revolution, and has produced four
distinct subgenres. The rst is the journalistic report or chronicle such
as Csar Leantes Con las milicias (With the militias). Second are the
accounts of their own experiences by nonprofessional writers, like Rafael
del Pinos Amanecer en Girn (Dawn in Girn)the author was a Cuban
pilot during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Third, works like Miguel Barnets
Biografa de un cimarrn (The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave), in
which the author transcribes, as an anthropologist, the oral testimony
of a man more than a hundred years old concerning the experiences of
his youth. Finally, there are works like Girn en la memoria (Giron in
the memory), by Vctor Casaus himself, which uses a lmlike montage
technique to bring together a variety of materials, including interviews,
documents, and press reports, around a particular theme.
These or works like them have served icaic directly for several
documentary lms, but lmmakers have also developed their own testi-
monial subgenres, says Casaus. The icaic newsreel is the rst of these
because its character as a week-by-week chronicle is not a simple piece-
meal record of the events but, under the guidance of Santiago lvarez,
became their interpretive analysis. It is obviously essential to the idea of
 The Documentary in the Revolution 211

the testimonial that it convey a sense of lived history. This means, in

cinema, that the camera is not to be a passive witness. The newsreel has
learned how to insert itself, so to speak, into the events it deals with by
breaking the inherited conventional structure of the newsreel form and
converting itself into a laboratory for the development of lmic language.
This inuenced the whole eld of documentary, with its already obvi-
ous anities to testimonial literature. However, it is not, says Casaus, a
matter of simply translating the written word into the lmic image or,
as sometimes happens, using a rst-person voice-over to narrate, and
the evolution of documentary technique adequate to the re-creation
of the literary genre in cinematic terms was not accomplished over-
night. The vast majority of the documentaries of the early years of the
Revolution, Casaus observes, are today forgottenthe proof that their
method did not succeed in transforming the immediate reality into an
enduring expression. This was not, according to Casaus, simply because
of the inexperience of the lmmakers, but rather because of an under-
estimation of documentary, and consequently the persistence of tech-
niques imported from the ction lm. The lms that have survived are
the ones that approached the documentary form creatively. In these
lms, says Casaus, a paradigmatic series of principles can be distin-
guished: rst, rapid and exible lming of unfolding reality without
subjecting it to a preplanned narrative mise-en-scne; second, the choice
of themesthe literacy campaign, military actions in defense of the
Revolution, the sugar harvest, cultural processes like the mobile cin-
emathese are all subjects of important documentaries; third, the em-
ployment of an audacious and intuitive style of montage, of which the
outstanding exponent is Santiago lvarez; and fourth, the use of directly
lmed interviews both for the narrative functions they are able to fulll
and because they provide the means of bringing popular speech to the
screen. This was the last of Casauss four principles actually to be incor-
porated into the Cuban documentary since the technical capacity for
direct sound lming was what the Cubans to begin with lacked.
This essay by Casaus is a piece of reective analysis of what the testi-
monial lm had already become at the time he wrote it. The ideas be-
hind the didactic lm, on the other hand, were actively developed by
icaic at the same time that it was experimenting in the genre itself, for
it is a form that acquires particular importance when a revolution
achieves power. Since militant lmmakers are no longer forced to work
 212 The Documentary in the Revolution

in clandestinity or semiclandestinity, the emphasis of their art changes,

the tasks for which their lms are intended qualitatively shift their focus,
and nowhere is this more marked than in the scope that now opens up
for a didactic cinema. As Pastor Vega explained in an article dating from
1970 titled Didactic Cinema and Tactics, when icaic set up a didactic
lms department in 1960, dealing with a whole range of scientic and
technical subjects, not all the necessary conditions for such a project
existed, but it wasnt possible to wait for them . . . the demands of a
revolution, which alters the dynamic of history in all its dimensions,
leaves no alternative.29 icaic recognized that it was necessary to create
a whole new batch of lmmakers without having the time to give them
proper training in the shape either of lengthy apprenticeship or more
formally in a lm school. The lms were needed. They would have to
learn on the job by jumping in at the deep end. But because of this, the
didactic lm had to become didactic in more than one way. A lm on a
scientic or technical subject intended to contribute to the training of
the technical cadres the Revolution needed would also serve the train-
ing of the cadres within icaic itself.
A lm might be needed, for example, on gastroenteritis. In a similar
way to Solanas and Getinos concept of militant cinema, such a docu-
mentary is conceived as an intervention into a given reality with the
object of modifying it by enabling people to transform itin this case,
by learning how to combat the disease. In order to accomplish this, the
lm has to become a learning experience for the lmmaker rst, before
it can be so for the audience. In this way, both become involved in a life-
and-death struggle, for in underdeveloped countries gastroenteritis is a
killer. What the lmmaker has to learn takes on a double aspectthere
is the subject on which the lm is to be made, and at the same time,
learning how to make this kind of lm. Formally speaking, these are
two separate functions, but in the circumstances they get completely
intertwined. Cine didctico then becomes a paradigm for new ways of
thinking about lm, and again, the original idea of the social documen-
tary is transformed.
The new tasks of the social documentary become the essential train-
ing ground in Cuban cinema because the lmmaker has to learn to
treat reality by engaging with the people the lm is for. Cine didctico
teaches that the value of communication is of paramount concern be-
cause the lm would achieve nothing if it did not succeed in its primary
 The Documentary in the Revolution 213

function, which is instruction (in the broadest sense). This theme is

taken up in a paper presented jointly to the National Congress of Cul-
ture and Education in 1971 by Jorge Fraga, Estrella Pantin, and Julio
Garca Espinosa, Towards a Denition of the Didactic Documentary.
The mood at the time of this Congressfour years after Ches death in
Bolivia, a year after the Battle for the Ten Million had not quite reached
its target for a ten-million-ton sugar harvest, and Fidel had made rigor-
ous self-criticismthis is a very dierent mood from that of the rst
few years. Euphoria has now given way to pragmatic realism. The joint
authors therefore begin by oering to this extremely workmanlike Con-
gress for its consideration the old utilitarian denition of the didactic
documentary as an instrument for use by a teacher in front of a class,
and proceed to demonstrate the inadequacy of this concept. icaics
rst didactic lms eleven years previously, they say, even those that were
not intended to be used as teaching aids, corresponded too much to
the functional criteria this model required. They were illustrations for
a learning situation; it didnt matter whether that situation was real or
potential.30 This is true. Despite some notable exceptions, those early
lms had often been somewhat overdeliberate in their style. Flexibility
and uidity take time to learn.
But after a decade, they said, it was time to be critical. Their rst con-
cern was that the didactic lm conceived this way does not provide the
maximum educational eciency even in the classroom it is intended
for, as long as it remains utilitarian and takes the form of exposition by
the teacher as its model and example. This is to constrain the medium
unnecessarily. Film is an expensive means of cultural communication.
It is impossible to make as many lms as are needed. Is it legitimate to
limit the scope of the lms that do get made, when they could be angled
to a broader synthesis of functions? Because the synthesis of functions
is precisely the method of cinema.
The icaic team then proceeded to reconstruct for the Congress the
idea of the didactic documentary according to the preoccupations that
had been animating their work over the course of the whole decade.
Their line of argument is itself eminently didactic. Much of what they
say is philosophically grounded in the analysis of commodity fetishism
and alienation, which says something about the style of Marxist thinking
that had developed at icaic, but it is equally signicant that they ap-
peal, as professional communicators speaking to a large audience that is
 214 The Documentary in the Revolution

made up of both professionals and acionados at all levels of culture

and education in the country, to more popular concepts and ideas. This
does not mean talking down, however, for in Cuba even popular ideas
are a long way from being the lowest common denominators of the
populism of the capitalist democracies. They rst take note of the her-
itage of cultural imperialism. They remind their listeners of the low level
of industrial development in the country, consequently of the low level
of science and technology, and the inadequacy of the means of commu-
nication endowed by neocolonialism. They observe that it is no coin-
cidence that in these conditions serious forms of cultural alienation to
be found in the metropolis, such as gambling, lotteries, and astrology,
make deep and extensive inroads into the consciousness of people in
underdeveloped countries. This produces a way of thinking that perceives
things only in a dissociated way, only as results, without grasping the
processes that create them. Underdeveloped thinking comes to be ruled
by a sense of contingency and fatalism, which harks back to the magical
(but the magical now shorn of most of its previous cultural legitimacy).
After twelve years of revolution, they say, we still nd examples of
this way of thinking even in our own communications media, mostly
modelled after the tendency to exalt results and omit the process which
led up to those results. But cinema possesses the very qualities needed
not only to communicate knowledge and skills eectively, but also to
educate for a rational, concrete, and dialectical way of thinking. Why?
Because it is capable of reproducing reality in motion and therefore of
demonstrating processes, and further, because it is capable of revealing
relationships between items that come from the most dissimilar condi-
tions of time and place. The utilitarian conception of the didactic doc-
umentary narrows down this eld of potential (like, we can add, any
kind of aesthetic prescriptivism, including that of the direct-cinema
purists). What is more, the result is a dry and boring genre that is sterile
and quite ahistorical. Capitalist cinema conventionally deals with the
problem of the genres dryness by adding enticements to the treatment
of the lm, the way that pills are sugarcoateda technique known from
advertising as the snare. Advertising appeals to stimuli which have
nothing to do with the nature of the product in order to create more
demand for it or stimulate the consumers interest: sex, desire for recog-
nition and prestige, fear of feelings of inferiorityanything apart from
concrete demonstration of the actual properties of the object. This
 The Documentary in the Revolution 215

mentality, which thinks only in terms of selling, becomes all-pervasive,

and everything, including ideas and feelings, is reduced to bundles of
exchange values. To fall in with all this was obviously hardly acceptable.
The didactic documentary, they said, must break once and for all with
this retrogressive tradition; it must link with the urgency of its subjects
and themes. The formal techniques employed must be derived from
the theme and put at its service. Its the old moral demand for unity be-
tween form and content.
Pastor Vegas account of the didactic lm has exactly the same moral
emphasis, and his arguments are similarly built on historical-materialist
analysis. The socioeconomic transformation created by the Revolution,
he explains, has propelled the newly literate peasant from the Middle
Ages into the second half of the twentieth century, to become an opera-
tor of tractors and agricultural machinery. This accelerated passage
through multiple stages of development, which the sudden acquisition
of the products of modern science and technology involves, requires a
qualitative leap in the process of mass education. In these circumstances,
the mass-communications media acquire the most important functions
as levers in the countrys development through their catalytic action.
The didactic lm must be transformed accordingly, throwing o the
molds of the form as it originated in the developed countries and going
in search of a new originality that arises from the very dierent pattern
of development of the Revolution. The lmmaker must acquire new
perspectives and go for a dierent lmic language than the archetypes
of the documentary tradition. The didactic lm must be seen as a new
aesthetic category, in which the artist and the pedagogue meetal-
though this only happens if certain imperatives are observed. For the
work of the artist and the pedagogue, aesthetic production and teaching
are not identical activities, and in the didactic lm certain requirements
of both must be met. This disjuncture disappears, however, when im-
mature ideological prejudices that paralyze mental processes are no
longer sustainable, as they cannot be, because all living thought is anti-
mechanistic.

Many of the principles evolved in the course of development of the so-

cial documentary in the new Latin American cinema, and especially in
Cuba, have strong parallels with positions that were taken up within
radical lm practices in Europe and North America over the same
 216 The Documentary in the Revolution

period. The Venezuelan critic Ral Beceyro is eectively speaking for

both when he writes that one of the initial tasks of new cinemas all
over the world has been to destroy certain norms of grammatical con-
struction. . . . A cinema that aspires to establish new ties with the specta-
tors or that intends to modify the role that spectators assign themselves
could not continue to use the formal structures [of what preceded].31
But, in certain respects, the radical lm cultures of the metropolis and
of Latin America think rather dierently.
Both would agree about naive realism. As the French art critic Pierre
Francastel had already written in 1951:
What appears on the screen, which our sensibility works on, is not
reality but a sign. The great error that has regularly been committed is to
embark upon the study of lm as if the spectacle of cinema placed us in
a double of reality. It should never be forgotten that lm is constituted
by images, that is to say, objects that are fragmentary, limited, and eet-
ing, like all objects. What materializes on the screen is neither reality,
nor the image conceived in the brain of the lmmaker, nor the image
that forms itself in our own brain, but a sign in the proper sense of
the term.32
But what is a sign in the proper sense of the term? This is where the
trouble begins. Following Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of mod-
ern linguistics, as interpreted by structuralists of various disciplines, a
strong current within the new radical lm theory in the metropolis has
come to regard the sign as a very peculiar kind of symbol. As the cultural
theorist Fredric Jameson has written:
The philosophical suggestion behind all this is that it is not so much the
individual word or sentence [or image in the case of lm] that stands
for or reects the individual object or event in the real world, but
rather that the entire system of signs . . . lies parallel to reality itself; that
it is the totality of systematic language, in other words, which is analo-
gous to whatever organized structures exist in the world of reality, and
that our understanding proceeds from one whole or Gestalt to the other,
rather than on a one-to-one basis. But, of course, it is enough to pre-
sent the problem in these terms, for the whole notion of reality itself
to become suddenly problematical.33
This is quite dierent from the problematic nature of reality within
underdevelopment, where the concept of truth follows another dialectic.
In the structuralist system, says Jameson, truth becomes a somewhat
redundant idea, as it must do when there is nothing to which it can be
 The Documentary in the Revolution 217

unproblematically referred. An image in a lm, therefore, is not to be

thought of as truthful just because it pictures something real to which it
corresponds, even though the automatic mechanism of the camera lead
us to believe so. Instead, it is said to yield meaning only because it stands
in a certain relationship to the other images through which it is, so to
speak, refracted.
In any radical lm practice in the underdeveloped world, truth re-
mains immediate and material without falling back into transparency
and naive realism. It is not a question of the accuracy or fullness of t of
the image to what it pictures, which everyone knows can never be any-
thing like complete. More important, it lies in the relationship with the
audience, because the meaning of what is shown depends as much on
the viewers position as on the system of signs within which it functions.
This has also been of great concern to radical lm theory in the metrop-
olis, but the new Latin American lmmakers were worried less about the
way the lmic discourse positions the spectator and rather more whether
it recognizes where the spectator is already. This arguably requires a
more conscientious political attitude on the part of the lmmaker.
The result is a dierence in the practice of cultural politics, and the
emphasis of lmic forms of intervention in the public sphere. In the
metropolis, there is little to stop the lm, the lm as text, and the dis-
courses of cinema, from becoming dissociated objects in themselves.
Whereas, according to the Colombian documentarists Jorge Silva and
Marta Rodrguez, the radical lmmaker in Latin America becomes
more and more involved in the process of the masses and the lm
must become an auxiliary part of this whole formative process.34 This
is a dialectical aair that promotes a very dierent attitude toward both
the concept of truth and the criteria of truth on the screen. Not because
the masses are seen as depositories of truth in the mechanical manner
of lazy Marxism, but because the lmmaker is involved in a collective
process, which the philosophy of liberation holds to be an inherent
potential of underdevelopment, in which truth undergoes redenition
through concientizacin.
 CHAPTER TEN
The Revolution in the Documentary

We have seen how it came about that a generation of lmmakers emerged

in Cuba in the early 1960s who were not only committed to the Revolu-
tion but also to the task of revolutionizing cinema. The very navet of
the lm culture they inherited became an elemental factor in their devel-
opment. Through the concientizacin that the encounter with the popu-
lar audience brought about, they found themselves questioning their
own navet, and thus became involved in questioning the production
of the image. Because of the sense of urgency that the Revolution im-
parted, they had to do this not so much theoretically as practically. Only
this would correspond to the demands of revolutionary politics; it be-
came a priority in the program icaic adopted. As Alfredo Guevara later
explained: In the beginning we faced the dilemma of either teaching or
doing. We lacked time for artistic introspection and decided on making
lms at once, without wasting time on theory. We began from scratch
and lming became our school.1 And yet, as we have also seen, the
school that the Revolution itself constituted impelled the lmmakers
into theoretical reection on the nature of their practice, and even in
the early years the level of theoretical discussion in icaic was not at all
undeveloped.
With the priority of practice went a commitment to documentary.
Everywhere in Latin America where lmmakers had become active, the
concern for documentary was a concern to produce images that ques-
tioned reality. The critical realism that fueled the new Latin American
cinema was both an outgrowth and a transformation of the tradition of

218
 The Revolution in the Documentary 219

the social documentary. In Cuba, the problem of creating an authentic

popular lm culture within the Revolution in place of the heritage of
cultural colonization expressed itself in the question of how to overcome
the distance of the screen from the streets that lay outside the cinemas.
The key to the solution was to take the naive relationship of the audi-
ence to the screen and build on it, transforming it in the process into a
collective reevaluation of the nature, content, and status of the image
a process that was to yield some extraordinary lms within only a few
years.
A couple of documentaries that appeared in 1965 can be seen in his-
torical retrospect to give clear notice of something new in Cuban cin-
ema. The two lms are Hombres del caaveral (Men of sugar) directed
by Pastor Vega, and Now, directed by Santiago lvarez.
Now is a lm to a songwhich had been banned in the United States
where it came fromsung by the black singer Lena Horne, a militant call
to the black oppressed that employs the rousing tune of the Ashkenazi-
Israeli dance song Hava Nagila. Upon this sound track lvarez con-
structs a powerful collage on racial discrimination in the United States,
which he had observed during a visit many years before the Revolu-
tion, on a trip from Florida, through the Deep South, and up to New
York.2 The images in the lms pretitle sequence are of racist incidents
in California in August 1965 followed by a photograph of President Lyn-
don Johnson meeting with a group of blacks under the leadership of
Martin Luther King (whom lvarez was to eulogize in lm three years
later after his assassination)a juxtaposition that establishes the lms
tone of skeptical irony. This short lm essay is impressive not only for
the resourcefulness with which it uses its found materials, including
pirated newsreel, but also for the syncopation of the editing, which
intensies the insistence of the song and leads up to its militant ending
better than it would have done by slavishly following the musics sur-
face beat.
lvarezs lm acquired within a few years the reputation of being a
work of great and forceful originality. The impression made by Pastor
Vegas Hombres del caaveral was hardly comparable. It is dicult to
judge, but this may be because stylistically the lm is somewhat self-
eacing, the very opposite of lvarezs bombshell. But it is certainly a
lm of considerable originality, which gives it more than historical inter-
est. The historical context, however, is crucial to its proper assessment:
 220 The Revolution in the Documentary

it is a product of the ideological debate led by Che Guevara in the mid-

1960s about the moral qualities of work in revolutionary society.
It was Che who, to begin with, propelled the Cuban economy toward
central direction and control. At the same time, however, he rejected
mechanical and overly schematic explanations of the economic forces
involved. Some have said that Che was too idealist, or at any rate too
voluntaristic, but the Revolution was attempting to transform the forces
of production and Che wished to see the process of socialist economic
development operate as a force for the creation of a new morality, which
would itself feed and strengthen the transition to socialism. Accordingly,
he argued for moral as opposed to material incentives in the struggle to
relieve the islands almost unrelieved monocultural dependency on sugar.
The rst few years of the Revolution saw a large migration of labor
from agriculture to urban industrial and service employment, in line
with the attempt to break this dependency by rapid economic diversi-
cation. The expansion of the urban sector was relatively easy because of
a large pool of un- or underutilized resources, which included labor.
Unemployment in 1958 had been ocially rated at 17 percent3 a gure
that disguised the truth about rural employment, because so many of
those who worked in the sugar harvest actually worked only a few
months in the year. The rest was known as tiempo muerto (dead time).
Urban expansion was partly designed to take up this hidden, seasonal
unemployment, but it left a problematic reduction in the labor force
available for the harvest. The solution ultimately lay in the development
of agricultural technology, but because of the diculties of designing
harvesters suitable for the crop, the terrain, and the climate, this was a
matter for the future. Meanwhile, there was need of a system of tempo-
rary redeployment of urban labor to agricultural production during
the harvest. As Bertram Silverman has explained:

The type of labor required was the most menial and unskilled. Material
incentives would have had to be unusually high to induce urban labor
into these occupations. Moreover, the use of wage dierentials made
little sense because the transfer was frequently of workers from more
skilled and productive activities to less skilled.4

In such circumstances, the idea of mobilizing labor through moral

incentives was perfectly logical, though there were also certain contra-
dictions, which did not escape attention. The moral incentive, if it is to
 The Revolution in the Documentary 221

operate truly, cannot be manipulated from above. It must be generated

and sensed within the populace. This, says Silverman, is why many
Cubans came to ask, with characteristic directness, How can you plan
voluntary work? Is this not a contradiction in terms? Abroad, people
didnt even ask; the mass media in the metropolis simply pooh-poohed
the whole idea, scorning it as one more case of Communist manipula-
tion of the population.
Clearly, this was an area where the social documentary had a crucial
role to play, as potentially one of the most eective forms in which to
militate for moral aims without losing sight of realityat least if an
appropriate new political language could be found. Hombres del caaveral
is indeed far from strident agitprop and the political tract. It is the study
of a brigade of voluntary workers from the city at work in the sugar
harvest, with no commentary, and a meticulously observational camera.
It opens, like Now, with an encapsulating juxtaposition: an electric light
display spelling out Vivan la Paz y el Socialismo (Long live peace and
socialism) followed by an image of someone being shot that immedi-
ately calls to mind the sacrice on which the Revolution is founded.
Then come a set of intertitles, which inform us that the lm was made
with the collaboration of one of the urban voluntary work brigades;
that the brigade in question, Africa Libre (Free Africa), held rst place
in the Emulacin Nacional, the national emulation league table; but
this was not the reason why the lmmakers had chosen this group as
their subjects (though maybe it was the reason, after all); the real reason
was (and then one by one come titles and portrait shots): The Cook;
The Driver; The Cane Cutters; The Chief; and all of them. The lm is a
record of a day and night in the life of the brigade.
In the course of the lms seventeen minutes we see the men at work,
with images of their factory in the city cut in to remind us where
theyve come from; we see them receiving letters from home, getting
medical attention, washing o the sweat of the elds, and playing cards.
They play music and listen to the radio. The style in which all these
scenes is presented is curiously reminiscent of some of the wartime lms
of Humphrey Jennings; in other words, the product of the accumulated
experience over more than ten years of the British social documentary.
Although Jennings was, of course, unknown in Cuba, many of the nar-
rative devices in Pastor Vegas lm are similar to those of the British
documentary, including the simple day-in-the-life narrative structure,
 222 The Revolution in the Documentary

although the music in the lm gives it, at the same time, a rather dier-
ent hue. In one respect, however, the lm goes beyond the classic social
documentary style, and that is in the use of expressionist devices to
communicate identication with the feelings of the subjects. The lm is
one of the very few Cuban documentaries of the period to make direct
self-reference to the artice of lmmaking. The workers have come back
from the elds, cleaned up, and started to relax. Suddenly, the mood is
interrupted by a camera slate and the call of action and we are in the
middle of a lesson in math. Eagerly attentive as they are, the men nd it
dicult to keep up their concentration, and through a series of changing
lens eects the screen embodies their weariness.
There is also an anity between Hombres del caaveral and a lm
that Santiago lvarez directed two years earlier, in 1963, Cicln (Hurri-
cane). Cicln was a newsreel special of twenty-two minutes (double the
usual length) using footage shot by a long list of cameramen belonging
to icaic, the Armed Forces, and Cuban television, who recorded the
devastation occasioned by Hurricane Flora in the provinces of Camagey
and Oriente, and the subsequent rescue work and clearing-up opera-
tions, which were personally directed in the eld by Fidel. The lm is an
example of how far the icaic newsreel, under lvarezs direction, had
already come in the space of only four years in the creation of a new
concept of the newsreel form. As lvarez explained in an interview:

A newsreel is essentially a product that provides information. Thats

clear, but it isnt all. And even though that may be its principal charac-
teristic, this is no reason either to neglect it or to turn it into a social
chronicle of socialism, following the usual linear sequence of uncon-
nected news items. My concern has not been to separate out the news,
but to join things up in such a way that they pass before the spectator as
a complete entity, with a single line of argument. This concern produces
a structure that aims at unity. Because of this, many people regard our
newsreel as documentary.5

In Cicln, this aim is achieved in a quite exemplary manner, not only

because the lm does entirely without commentary but nevertheless
succeeds in constructing the clearest narrative line, but also because of
the way it makes an exemplary political statement. The necessarily un-
planned actuality material assembled from the multitude of cameramen
in dierent places at the same time has, added to it, only some graphics
indicating the path of the hurricane across the island. These graphics
 The Revolution in the Documentary 223

are integrated with the images to produce a political statement: at one

point, we see the blades of a helicopter revolving in the same direction
as the animated hurricane in the preceding graphic, so that across the
cut, the helicopter becomes a symbol of command over the forces of
nature in response to natural disaster. This, rather than the heroic images
of Fidel, is the center of gravity in the lm. Fidel, anyway, doesnt look
heroic so much as businesslike. Like Hombres del caaveral, the style of
the lm is also self-eacing, and it was not immediately picked out as
innovatory. All the same, it is a lm that shows remarkable mastery over
what is arguably the most fundamental of the skills of lmmaking,
namely, narration with mute images, here juxtaposed only with music
and eects.
A year after Now, lvarez made another signicant advance. If Cicln
is a pure example of reportage, cine reportaje, he now extended this to
produce a piece of cine crnica, or documentary chronicle. Cerro Pelado
takes its title from the name of the boat that carried the Cuban sports
team to the Tenth Central American and Caribbean Games, held in 1966
in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where, being a U.S. colony, the North Americans
attempted to prevent Cuban participation. By now, lvarez has devel-
oped the basic characteristics of his style. The lm is constructed in the
form of a chronological visual narration of the events, with minimal
verbal commentary, interspersed with sections using montage and cap-
tions to expound the political background to the events. The whole is
knitted together with music, which is used in place of both commentary
and direct sound, not just to ll space on the sound track but to narrate
the lm. In order to achieve this, lvarez not only employs humor in
his choice of musical items but also draws on musics own iconography.
Shots of the Training Center for Cuba Counterrevolutionaries in
Puerto Rico (as a caption describes it), for example, are juxtaposed with
the fast passage from Rossinis William Tell overture, which naturally re-
calls its use as the title music of the television western Lone Ranger series,
which was well known in Cuba. lvarez thus calls up the stereotypes of
the idiom of cultural imperialism only to invert them, and present the
counterrevolutionaries as imitation cowboys, an image at once satirical
and deating, which at the same time condemns the way these people
see themselves, modeled on the propaganda myths of the United States.
To say that lvarez uses music to narrate is therefore to say that he
uses the cultural associations of his chosen music (its iconography) to
 224 The Revolution in the Documentary

orient the viewers frame of reference. What he is doing is to politicize

the representation through aesthetic means that are at once highly
articulate but nondiscursive. This, for lvarez, is a central resource of
political documentary, because it is a way of mobilizing popular intelli-
gence, which is not merely unformed by discursive intellect but, for this
very reason, lies in danger of suocation by the tricks of conventional
commentary.
Various sections of the lm are titled with chapter headings. This is
the boat is followed by scenes on board of the team dancing on deck.
This is the enemy leads into shots of warfare, and is repeated on the
right-hand side of a divided screen, superimposed over a sequence of
newspaper front pages, with moving images continuing screen left, to
form a most complex montage between both simultaneous and succes-
sive images. The dancing on deck is replaced by the athletes warming
up, cut with humor and grace to the music of El Manisero (The peanut
vendora Cuban song, composed by Moiss Simons, and not, as many
people think, North American). Shots of riemen practicing are crosscut
with the ever-present menace of aircraft circling overhead as the boat
approaches its destination, which in turn give way to images of warfare
in Vietnam and a newsreel interview with a captured U.S. Air Force pilot.
Another chapter heading introduces The site of the GamesPuerto
Rico, freely associated Yanqui Colony, and captions inform us of sig-
nicant statistics, interposed with images of Puerto Rican life and con-
ditions. Within this framework, these images, which critics pretending
to omniscience would regard as hackneyed, fully recover their eloquence.
Then comes the response of the Cuban athletes to the coast guards
refusal to admit the boatthe Declaration of the Cerro Pelado: The
rights of Cuba are not negotiablewhich forces the North Americans
to uphold the Olympic regulations that govern the games. After a sec-
tion on crude North American attempts at psychological warfare, the
lm ends with a lighthearted portrayal of Cuban victories on the eld
and Fidel greeting the returning athletes.
In 1965, the same year as Now, lvarez had already made another piece
of cine solidaridad, a nine-minute report titled Solidaridad Cuba y Viet-
nam (Cuba-Vietnam solidarity). This was the rst of many lms to
come on the struggle of the peoples in Southeast Asia. Two years later,
following Cerro Pelado, lvarez turned to Vietnam again to produce an
eighteen-minute compilation lm under the title Escalada del chantaje
 The Revolution in the Documentary 225

(Escalation of blackmail), a report on increasing U.S. aggression there.

Then came his rst trip to Southeast Asia and La guerra olvidada (The
forgotten war), a documentary report from Laos in which lvarez em-
ploys avant-garde music by the Cuban Leo Brouwer and the Italian
Communist composer Luigi Nono. The lm is subtitled Filmic Frag-
ments. Apart from war footage and narrative captions at the beginning
to summarize the history of Laos, lvarez simply, and once more with-
out commentary, shows us scenes of the activities of the Patriotic Front.
Many of these scenes are taken in the caves that provided refuge and pro-
tection. In addition to such activities as newspaper printing, schooling,
the manufacture of medicines, and a hospital, we also see the projection
of a lm of Laotian dramatic dance. This is perhaps a veiled reference to
the artice of lm. At any rate, it has the eect of placing quotation
marks around the doubly lmed, doubly projected image, thus empha-
sizing how dicult it is to reach to the heart of a reality beyond ones
direct experience. Through its very restraint, the lm becomes a moving
call upon the viewers ignorance. It is also a model of what can be made
under the most limited conditions, while refusing to engage either in
the sensationalizing tactics of the capitalist media or falling into the
trap of pretending, even for laudable propaganda purposes, that the
lm is more than it isan assembly of visual fragments.

Pastor Vega also made another signicant lm in 1967, Cancin del tu-
rista (Song of the tourist). This lm is in color and scope, one of the rst
Cuban lms to use such resources, and at no more than fteen minutes,
it is a paradigm of cine ensayo, the lm essay. The subject is the contrast
between underdevelopment and revolution. The titles come up over a
dancing girl in scanty costume gyrating in the style of the 1950s to
sound-track music composed by Carlos Farias, with pressing rhythms
and electronic noises that produce a menacing eect. The image here is
in sepia and, still in sepia, cuts to a river and the countryside. The rhythm
stops, leaving electronic noises over a series of images of underdevelop-
ment. There is a shot of children dancing, and of a boy tapping out the
rhythm on an upturned metal basin. Color begins to creep in very slowly
as we watch a singer, in synchronous sound, singing about a world with-
out love or money, in the style of a traditional ballad. Now come stills
of Fidel and then shots of Fidel in action on a podium, followed by
panoramic views of the demonstration he is addressing. Color continues
 226 The Revolution in the Documentary

to grow through images of industry and agriculture, women tractor driv-

ers, the mechanization of cane cutting, new housing, new roads. Here
the images are given an extra dimension, that of a wide-angle lens. The
succession of images is again narrated by the music, keeping the lm
constantly free from every demagogic trace. We catch a glimpse of a
couple kissing in the elds (even the theme of love becomes more ob-
jective, more lyrical) and then there is traditional dancing and images of
conviviality, entertainment, and sports; children doing physical training;
a ballet studio. The lm concludes with images of a solitary child lead-
ing back to further images of underdevelopment. A previous image of
Fidel reappears and the frame closes in on a girl standing behind him. A
title appears: sin fin (Without end). Not underdevelopment, that is,
but the struggle against it. Song of the tourist? The title is clearly ironic.
Another, even shorter, lm made a year earlier shows the same lucid
use of montage. The portrait of a North American soldier ghting in
Vietnam, La muerte de J. J. Jones (The death of J. J. Jones) is the work of
a young black director who had spent part of his youth in New York,
returning to Cuba with the victory of the Revolutionthe same who
made the experimental ctional short La jaula: Sergio Giral. Here there
is no specially composed music, but a sound track put together against
the black-and-white image on the editing bench to create a kind of
musique concrte in a highly satirical key. I am a soldier of the U.S.
Army in Vietnam, the lm begins. We ght Communism because Com-
munism wants to deny people Coca-Cola. It proceeds by deconstruct-
ingthat is, dissecting and dismemberingthe imagery of consumer
society, the mass media, the movies, comics, he-men of the Mr. Universe
type, the army, racism, and advertising. A patriotic army advertisement
is montaged with a lm clip of new recruits being inducted by a sergeant
who, between spitting, addresses the recruits: You guys are going to
hate the day you met me. As far as Im concerned, youre not human
beings. The images are assembled from an ad hoc range of sources,
mostly culled from the products of the North American publicity ma-
chine that sells the American way of life. They are images of a kind by
which Latin America is engulfed (the very phrase American way of life
is regularly used by Latin American writers on media and cultural im-
perialism in English to indicate this ubiquitousness).
After the induction, the lm comes to images of training and ghting,
intercut with shots of Tarzan. Scenes of Vietnam itself are accompanied
 The Revolution in the Documentary 227

by the Hallelujah ChorusFor the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

Images of German Nazism and the modern U.S. Nazi party are intro-
duced. The lm concludes with an infamous quotation from Hitler:
For the good of our country we need a war every ten or fteen years.
The play of montage on which these lms are carried is clearly and
immediately reminiscent of the role that montage played in Soviet cin-
ema in the latter part of the 1920s. In the work of lvarez himself, as
well as a number of other examples, it comes close to Dziga Vertov. The
anity is there because the two cinemas were animated by the same
qualities of revolutionary thought, intelligence, and imagination. Art is
not a mirror which reects the historical struggle, but a weapon of that
struggle, Vertov declared. Cinema, lvarez proclaimed, is not an
extension of revolutionary action. Cinema is and must be revolutionary
action in itself. We are here, says Vertov, to serve a specic class
workers and peasantswe are here to show the world as it is and to ex-
plain the bourgeois structure of the world to the workers. One can
only be a revolutionary artist, according to lvarez, by being with the
people and by communicating with them.6 The two cinemas center on
the same denition of cinema as a revolutionary weapon, as a medium
of communication, as a dialectical medium in which montage and the
process of editing is the means of synthesis. And they both prioritize
the need to oer in the lm an interpretative vision according to the goals
of revolutionary society.
But the Cuban montage style also reects a purely practical prob-
lemthe lack of sucient material and resources. The North Ameri-
cans, says lvarez, blockade us, so forcing us to improvize. For instance,
the greatest inspiration in the photo-collage of American magazines in
my lms is the American government who have prevented me getting
hold of live material. Perhaps, as Miguel Orodea observes about this,
this is why there isnt a theory that holds Alvarezs work together and
why he doesnt seem interested in elaborating one.7 This indeed is
something that distinguishes lvarez from other Cuban lmmakers.
Alea, Garca Espinosa, Alfredo Guevara, Pastor Vega, Massip, Fraga, and
many others have engaged in theoretical reection. lvarez does not
seem to have the same intellectual cast of mind, or even a bent for crit-
icism. He expresses himself best in conversation. His written pieces are
few and short and originally produced for meetings and conferences,
in a terse kind of political shorthand. Technical advances, Orodea
 228 The Revolution in the Documentary

explains, have allowed Alvarez to experiment on a much bigger scale

than Vertov could have aimed at, in the use of techniques of rostrum
animation, optical re-lming, sound, colour, etc. Alvarezs visual re-
sources vary from the use of photographic material from Playboy and the
whole of the North American press, to extracts from Hollywood movies,
Soviet classics, scientic documentaries, archive footage and television
images, newspaper headlines and animated titles, put together in coun-
terpoint with the most eclectic range of music. It is dicult, then, to
speak of lvarezs style if by style is meant anything like the conscious
pursuit of a set of rationalized aesthetic aims. His style, says Orodea,
consists in adapting to the needs of the moment and using everything
at his disposal. It is a style of constant evolution and change. The only
constantly dominant criterion in his cinema is support for the Revolu-
tion and the anti-imperialist oensive. As lvarez himself puts it, My
style is the style of hatred for imperialism.8 He describes himself as a
product of accelerated underdevelopment:
The Revolution made me a lm director. I learned the job fondly handling
millions of feet of lm. I was enabled to fulll very old dreams, from the
time of Nuestro Tiempo, when we had a lm club and the aspiration to
create a Cuban cinema that would be part of a dierent kind of society.
I was restless, like every good mothers son, who goes to the cinema a lot
but cannot express his restlessness. Now that I can, I do.9
It was not only his restlessness that he expressed. Born in Havana in
1919, lvarez is the son of immigrant parents from Spain; his father,
who earned his living as a corner shopkeeper and later a grocers sup-
plier, was arrested for anarchist activities when Santiago was about ve
or six years old. For a couple of years while he was in prison, the family
had to struggle hard to survive. At the age of fteen, lvarez started
working, as a compositors apprentice. Before long he was participating
in strikes organized by the Union of Graphic Arts. As his political in-
volvement grew, he also decided to get himself an education. He went to
night school, where he found himself setting up a students association.10
From these beginnings he carried forward with him a powerful sense of
struggle, from which, as his creative mastery owered in the 1960s, he
drew deep poetic feeling.
The lm in which this poetry is rst maturely expressed is Hanoi
martes 13 (Hanoi Tuesday the 13ththe equivalent, in Latin America, of
Friday the 13th), lmed in North Vietnam on the same trip as the Laos
 The Revolution in the Documentary 229

lmic fragments. One of lvarezs indisputable masterpieces, this is a

lm of the greatest sensitivity, made with the greatest integrity, and con-
structed with the greatest economy of means, with memorable music by
Leo Brouwer.
At the beginning and the end of the lm, color is used briey for
paintings and engravings by Vietnamese artists that testify to the rich-
ness of Vietnamese cultural traditions. They accompany at the beginning
a striking text about the inhabitants of Southeast Asia by Jos Mart,
from a childrens book he wrote called La edad de oro (The golden age),
which speaks of the culture of the Anamites and their age-old struggle
for freedom. This opening is abruptly interrupted by an explosive mon-
tage that portrays the grotesque birth of a monster in Texas in 1908
none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson, who is treated to a rapid and
satirical biography. The Vietnamese images resume peacefully, in black
and white, with a visual account of their methods of shing and agri-
culture. This paradigmatic structure of interruption and resumption is
followed through the length of the lm. Work in the elds is inter-
rupted by the ight overhead of attacking airplanes (the lm takes its
title from the date of this attack, at 2:50 p.m. on December 13, 1966,
shortly after lvarez and his crew had arrived in Hanoi, and while they
were out lming), and the workers in the eld discard their plows and
take up their guns.
These shots are unimpeachable actuality. lvarez lmed them be-
cause he was there already lming when the attack began, and he had
his wits about him. The lms title sequence, after the Johnson montage,
has told us where and when: now we discover what. Because of the way
lvarez constructs the narrative, to give this information in a commen-
tary would be redundant. And yet the scenes are not particularly dra-
matic, as they would be if this were conventional reportage. lvarez
knows they do not need to be, especially if the rest of the material in
which they are embedded is also lmed and edited in such a way that it
too gives up its information visually and without commentary.
As the workers resume, lvarez inserts a title, not only to avoid break-
ing the mood of visual attention with a commentators voice, but also
the better to make his words speak for the Vietnamese rather than the
lmmakers: We turn anger into energy. Subsequently, we move to
Hanoi and gradually begin to pick out from among the many activities
the lm observes shots that show the artisanal process of production of
 230 The Revolution in the Documentary

strange, large concrete drums. Sunk into the pavements and open spaces,
they each have a lid and turn out to be air-raid shelters, just big enough
for one or two people. To an educated European viewer, these drums
are reminiscent of nothing so much as the dustbins or mounds of earth
in which characters in the plays of Samuel Beckett become immobi-
lized, so much so that one would be forced to regard this connotation as
obligatory if this were a European lm. But here they become symbols
of something that, though oppressive, signals primarily deant tenacity
(which, in a sense, they do in Beckett too).
Although in this lm the means are of the simplest, the editing is ex-
ceedingly subtle. True, it has a certain looseness, but the result is that
the narrative line is spun out in such a way that it becomes anything but
linear. It unfolds more like continuous counterpoint, which also gives
you time to reect upon the images and their rhythms. Brouwers music
encourages this, with the result that the lm informs in a manner not
just dierent, but positively alien to what documentary orthodoxy ex-
pects. Film by lm, lvarez is turning the whole mode of documentary
cinema inside out.
The score for this lm is one of the nest that Brouwer has written.
The style has nothing to do with conventional lm music, but belongs
rather with isolated examples of the idiom of the contemporary concert
hall brought to the screenlike, say, the music Hanns Eisler wrote in
1940 for Joris Ivenss Rain of 1929, in which the relationship of music to
image transcends conventional associations, the two become much more
independent of each other than normal, and the music far more plastic
than usual. Brouwer uses a small group of instruments with contrasting
tone colors, and freely juxtaposes echoes of traditional Vietnamese music,
which, however, he neither merely imitates nor pastiches, together with
a variety of modernist eects, in a continuously unfolding texture. What
is even more remarkable are the circumstances under which this score
was written. The job had to be done, Brouwer recalled, in record time,
and I even had to compose by telephone. lvarez called him, he
explained, and over the phone described the succession of shots with
their timings. But this, he adds, was just the way lms got made in Cuba.
Instead of the usual successive stages, with the music coming almost
last, everything got done practically at the same time.11 To go by the
comments of other collaborators of lvarez, this atmosphere of cre-
ative improvisation was particularly strong in the newsreel department,
 The Revolution in the Documentary 231

which lvarez directed, not merely for the expectable reasons but be-
cause lvarez encourages this way of working.
In Hasta la victoria siempre (Always until victory), also made in 1967,
lvarez virtually reinvents cine denuncia, the lm of denunciation, in a
twenty-minute newsreel put together in the space of forty-eight hours
of nonstop work in response to the traumatic news of the death of Che
Guevara in Bolivia. It was made not to be shown in cinemas but, at Fidels
request, to be projected at a mass demonstration in the Plaza de la Revo-
lucin in Havana preceding Fidels eulogy for el Che. Only the intense
cooperation of lvarez and his team made this possible. The triumph of
the lm is that even working at such speed, lvarez produces a poetic
and far from simple aesthetic construction, though the lm is under-
standably very rough at the seams and edges. Beginning with a prologue
that employs stills to portray the misery of life in Bolivia and signal the
presence there of U.S. imperialism, the lm uses fragments of archive
footage of el Che during the guerrilla war in Cuba, and then after the
Revolution cutting cane with others in the elds, to exemplify his creed
of revolutionary selessness, and it concludes with grainy, poorly
focused, but riveting images of two of Ches last public speeches, at the
UN in December 1964, and the Non-Aligned Conference of 1965.
Che had been involved since the Revolution, and especially after 1962,
in an extended theoretical debate on the transition to socialism, in which
his own always clearly argued position had not always been accepted.
Outside Cuba, too, his theory of guerrilla struggle around a foco (focus)
was hotly argued, and the disagreements were only highlighted by his
death. Fidel would not allow such blemishes on Ches character, whom
he called the most extraordinary of our revolutionary comrades and
our revolutionary movements most experienced and able leader. Repu-
diating attempts now after his heroic and glorious death . . . to deny the
truth or value of his concepts, his guerrilla theories, he asked what was
so strange about the fact that he died in combat. What was stranger
was that he did not do so on one of the innumerable occasions when
he risked his life during our revolutionary struggle. He then went on to
endorse the essential element in the example that Che had left behind
him in Cuba: he had a boundless faith in moral values, in human con-
science . . . he saw moral resources, with absolute clarity, as the funda-
mental lever in the construction of communism.12 The lm is a perfect
preparation for Fidels eulogy. The excerpts from Ches speeches empha-
 232 The Revolution in the Documentary

size his anti-imperialist resolution, which he articulates in a character-

istically blunt and direct fashion, in simple but forceful and graphic
language. It is not that Fidel told lvarez what he was going to say or
what to put in the lmthere was no time for that and, in any case, Fidel
was not inclined to such artistic collaboration. He once told the Soviet
documentarist Roman Karmen, who asked what he would like them to
lm, Unfortunately, I understand nothing about the art of lm, so I re-
frain from giving advice.13 It was rather that Fidel had seen the close-
ness of lvarezs thought to his own. And from now on, the relationship
between lvarez and Fidel is to grow closer.
Hasta la victoria siempre has left a curiously tangible imprint in the
popular culture of contemporary Cuba. For his sound-track music,
lvarez uses a piece by Prez Prado, a Cuban composer who had once
been associated with one of the most popular of Cuban singers, Beny
Mor. Prez Prado had left Cuba for the United States, where he devised
the transformation of the Cuban dance rhythm known as cha-cha-cha,
which took Tin Pan Alley by storm in the 1950sone of a succession of
Latin American dance rhythms with which the music industry in the
United States periodically injects itself. Carried to U.S. shores by the
process of migration, the culture industry there pulls them out and re-
processes them, and then churns them out in sterilized, safe, and predi-
gested form, which, of course, it reexports. The piece that lvarez uses
here is a syrupy arrangement that on rst hearing sounds oddly inappro-
priate to a European ear inclined to rejectlike Adorno and Eisler in
their book on composing for the cinemathe devices of musical com-
mercialism. A rst reaction, then, is how can lvarez be so tasteless as to
use this kind of music? The piece, however, is actually a version by Prez
Prado of a work by the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, composer of the
nationalist bourgeoisie, one of the few Latin American composers of art
music with the originality and expertise to have commanded a reputation
in Europe; and it turns out that lvarez is doing some rearranging of his
own. By using this music, lvarez is, as it were, reclaiming it. This, at any
rate, is what it must now seem, for to this day the piece is indissolubly
fused in Cuban popular consciousness with Ches memory, and is regu-
larly played on the radio and at gigs on the anniversary of his death.
A year later, in 1968, lvarez produced his most biting piece of anti-
imperialist satire yet, LBJ, which has deservedly become one of his best-
 The Revolution in the Documentary 233

known shorts. Running eighteen minutes, it is a stunning piece of visual

and musical montage made entirely of found materials (except for titles),
which achieves a pitch of satirical denunciation that lvarez seems to
have reserved especially for Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The lm is in three main sections with a prologue and an epilogue.
These sections correspond to the three letters of Johnsons initials, which
are used to stand for Luther, Bob, and John (or Jack): Martin Luther
King and the two Kennedys. It is a bold play on the strange coincidence
that the corpses of these three men littered Johnsons ascent. lvarez
does not directly accuse Johnson of assassination, but this is beside the
point. There is no commentary, no direct verbal statement, and accusa-
tions by unsympathetic critics that the lm is nothing but the expres-
sion of Marxist hysteria about conspiracy say more about them than
about the lm. What lvarez is doing is to portray Johnsons presidency
as the culmination of a whole history of sociopolitical corruption, not
of individualsthe matter of individual presidential corruption was
to come with Johnsons successorbut of the American way of life it-
self. As Stuart Hood has put it, the lm is a deadly and accurately
aimed attack on a political system in which assassination had become
an accustomed weapon and the circumstances of the killings veiled in
misinformation and mystery.14
The core of the satire is the image, culled from a North American
newspaper cartoon, of Johnson as the incarnation of the Texas cowboy
on his bucking bronco. lvarez doubles this up with Johnson as a me-
dieval knight in armor astride his mount, and reinforces his line of attack
with clips from two types of Hollywood moviewesterns and the his-
torical adventure. Movies of this kind are very familiar in Cuban cine-
mas, and Cubans, like other audiences, are still ingenuously attached to
them to one degree or another. These clips are inscope, and in relming
them on the optical camera the lmmakers have not used an anamor-
phic lens to unsqueeze the imagebecause the Cubans didnt have the
appropriate lens for this particular piece of equipment. But the eect
conforms entirely with the aim of the lm; it puts quotation marks
round the clips, as if to foreground the iconographic dimension of Holly-
wood mythology. And by applying this mythology to Johnson, lvarez
symbolizes one of the ideological functions of the popular culture of
the marketplace.
 234 The Revolution in the Documentary

The entire fabric of the lm is woven out of allusions and connota-

tions of this kind, combined in a crisscrossing montage of ne political
wit. In the sequence portraying the assassination of JFK, for example,
the picture crosscuts a still photo of the presidents car in the fateful
Dallas cavalcade, showing the scene supposedly from the assassins point
of view, gunsights superimposed, with a shot not of a rieman but of a
medieval archer aiming a crossbow. A moment later, Johnson taking
over the White House is captured by a photograph of Kennedys rocking
chair being carried away by the removal men.
As the Cuban critic Manuel Lpez Oliva put it, in the Havana news-
paper El Mundo at the time the lm appeared, Johnson becomes an
X-ray caricature of the North American hero. The image is multi-
plied and distorted so that each aspectthe initials of the name, the
face, the grin, Johnsons little fancieslike his pet dogshis hands
come to amplify the subjects eeting attributes, turning them into
symbolic allusions that ll out the representation of the death-laden
acronym.15 This review captured the signicance of the lm in its mo-
ment very well. It appeared to many people in Cuba at the time as a
too-personalized poetic, which broke away from lvarezs preceding
and, as it were, more classical style. It is highly personalized, says Lpez
Oliva, but not for that reason inferior. Several of lvarezs lms antici-
pated LBJ, like three that had gained international awardsCicln,
Now, and Hanoi martes 13. They had used the same type of montage to
create a new expressive dimension quite capable of carrying a narrative,
even though the images employed were the most diverse, and some-
times even contradictory. There were some recent newsreels too, he
says, especially a report on springtime sowing, where again, traditional
poetics were mixed with a poetic logic of the photographic image that is
taken direct from lifein other words, a kind of fusion of the individual
language of the artist with the aesthetic logic of the camera, in which
the primary connotation of the image is public and common.
What Lpez Oliva is arguing for, in the Cuban context, is the recog-
nition of an expressive need in lvarezs idiom: in political terms, that
both authority and popular opinion should rearm the artists auton-
omy of style, which Fidel had recognized in the Words to the Intellec-
tuals of 1961. By the late 1960s, the debate about the application of the
principles had, if anything, intensied, and Lpez Olivas review is
 The Revolution in the Documentary 235

densely argued. lvarez occupied a cetrifugal position as the head of the

newsreel department and it fell to him to be, as Lpez Oliva puts it, the
rst lmmaker in Cuba to get to the point of entirely banishing classical
rhetoric from the lens. To be sure, the result was a pretty personal
expressive structure, but because of the way lvarez and his team
worked, it was also collective. People around icaic knew that. It also
constituted a lucid collage assembly of ideas, in which historical, ideo-
logical, and didactic elements were all imaginatively deployed. In
lvarez, Lpez Oliva concludes, art, documentary, and politics coalesce
into an organic unity inseparable from the very lmstrip itself, which
becomes wholly and positively suggestive from start to nish. There is no
question but that the Cubans found in LBJ a paradigmatic expression of
the deance with which they responded to the loss of Che Guevara.

lvarez forced the pace, but there are also other signicant lms of
these years to be noted. In 1964, there was the rst documentary by Sara
Gmez, Ir a Santiago (Im going to Santiago)we shall look at all of
Sara Gmezs lms separately later on. Cuban and Latin American critics
have singled out several others, including El ring, a short on boxing by
scar Valdz (1966), and Alejandro Sadermans Hombres de mal tiempo
(Men of bad times, 1968), which the Peruvian Juan M. Bullitta has de-
scribed as a lm about the good memory of a group of veterans from
Cubas independence struggles and hence a ne example of cine rescate.16
Then there was Octavio Cortzars Por primera vez from 1967, and a
year later another lm of his, an inquiry into the hold still exercised on
various sectors of the population by the religious beliefs of underdevel-
opment, a piece of cine encuesta called Acerca de un personaje que unos
llaman San Lzaro y otros llaman Babal (About a personality some call
San Lzaro and others Babal, 1968). In El ring, Bullitta nds a demon-
stration of the advantages of the compact dialectical montage of the
classic structuralist methodology of the documentary. The lm is a
portrait of the world of boxing under several aspects. It juxtaposes
sequences of training and interviews with both a trainer and a retired
ghter from the time of Cubas most famous boxer, Chocolatn, con-
trasting what the sport used to be like with what it had now become,
with the commercialism removed. Bullitta singles out Sadermans lm
for its avoidance of the frenetic and overaudacious uses of the camera
 236 The Revolution in the Documentary

that, he says, constitute one of the notorious weaknesses of Cuban cin-

ema. For us, the most signicant of these lms is the last, but that will
be in another context later on.
There are also two lms made in 1968 by Jos Massip. In Madina-Boe,
Massip reported from the liberation struggle in Portuguese Guinea, as
lvarez did from Southeast Asia, but using a distinct approach. Massip
brings to the screen a close identication with African culture, which is
one of the constant features of his work. There is an anity with Pastor
Vegas Hombres del caaveral in the way, using captions but no commen-
tary, he selects individuals from the group in the guerrilla band he is
lming for individual portraits: Braima, the Hunter, who performs
ancestral rites before going out hunting; Indrissa, who is a Builder of
Canoes; Kalunda dAcosta, a Football Player; and Fode, the Poet. He
then develops the report through parallel scenes at the camp and at a
guerrilla hospital base, where a doctor from Portugal is one of the per-
sonnel, a white man whose antifascist commitment leads him to give
his services to the liberation struggle. The sense of actuality is intensi-
ed by the use, a couple of times, of a simple intertitle, At this very mo-
ment, to mark the crosscutting between the hospital and the camp in
the scrub, where the guerrillas are preparing for an attack against enemy
positions in the village of Madina, where some of them come from.
Scenes of Braima the hunter have prepared us for the rites and rituals
the ghters observe before setting out, and the lm ends with shots from
behind the guerrilla lines as they go into the attack; these are built up by
the special-eects department back in the studios into the battle it had
not proved possible to lm, and the sounds of battle cross-fade into
children singing, over still images of childrens faces. Like La guerra olvi-
dada, Hanoi martes 13, and the two lms by Pastor Vega, this is a lm in
which revolutionary urgency is expressed reectively, and with a strong
feeling of human empathy.
Massips Nuestro olimpiada en la Habana (Our Olympiad in Havana),
on the other hand, is a lm of idiosyncratic Cuban humor, down to the
allusion in the title to Graham Greenes novel. The Olympiad in ques-
tion is the international chess tournament that Havana hosted in 1968.
The lm is a simple nineteen-minute montage of the preparations for
the tournament; the interest taken by quite large numbers of ordinary
Cubans; the tournament games of the grand mastershere the camera
picks out facial expressions and little unconscious nervous ticks and
 The Revolution in the Documentary 237

gestures as they concentrate; and the scene in the open air in which one
of the grand masters performs his trick of playing simultaneous games
against all comers, one of whom, of course, is Fidel. The shots of Fidel
in this lm are perhaps the most original that had yet been seen of him in
Cuban cinema. They conform to none of the common images of Fidel
in the old photos and newsreels as a young lawyer and then a guerrilla
comandante, or those of the Revolution in power, where he becomes an
orator and a TV star, the embodiment of Cuban pride and deance.
Here, following the glimpses we have had of so many dierent styles of
concentration among players at the chessboard, Fidel is suddenly seen
as just another of them, both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
It might well be said that in this way Massip humanizes Fidels image,
except that it is not as if it were not already human.
In subsequent years, the image of Fidel on the screen is to undergo
considerable elaboration, above all, but not exclusively, in the work of
lvarez, who becomes something like his poet laureate. On three occa-
sions lvarez traveled with Fidel on foreign trips, which he chronicled
in lms of length: De Amrica soy hijo . . . y a ella me debo (Born of the
Americas) of 1972, the lm of Fidels visit to Chile, is by far the longest,
195 minutes in the full version; but . . . Y el cielo fue tomado por asalto
(. . . And heaven was taken by storm), Fidels East European and African
tour of 1972, and El octubre de todos (Everyones October, 1977), of the
second African tour, run 128 and 80 minutes, respectively. As Stuart Hood
reected, after a retrospective of lvarezs work in London in 1980, we
are not used to lengthy documentaries like this with their easy pace and
a certain discursive quality which can be deceptively innocent, espe-
cially De Amrica soy hijo . . . , loose-jointed but powerful in its cumu-
lative eect and its insistent contextualisation of the Chilean situation.17
They oer, nonetheless, a rich collection of glimpses of Fidel in a large
variety of circumstances, both formal and informal. As an orator, Fidel
comes across in these lms as both jurist and actor: he commands his
part as an actor like Olivier in a Shakespeare play delivering a monologue
to a gripped theater. There is no denying that Fidel greeting crowds
and crowds greeting Fidel can become repetitive, but such images are
frequently oset by moments of individual interaction, such as an ex-
change he has with a working woman at a rally in Chile, or by the habit
lvarez has of leaving in the bits that many an impatient editor would
wish to leave on the cutting-room oor (untidy moments, as Hood
 238 The Revolution in the Documentary

Images of Fidel

calls them)Fidel dgeting with the microphones on the podium in

front of him, for instance. To these one must add the manner of his inter-
action with the gathered crowds, in both individual shots and whole
sequences, like a scene in which he plays basketball with students in
Poland and which gave the lie to rumors in the capitalist media of a
heart attack. They all add up to the image of a man who is, in fact, like
the lm star, larger than life.
This is tempered, however, by two other appearances he makes, in
lvarezs Mi hermano Fidel (My brother Fidel) of 1977, and a sequence
in Jorge Fragas 1973 feature-length documentary La nueva escuela (The
new school). In both these lms, though in rather dierent circum-
stances, we observe Fidel in direct personal interaction with ordinary
Cubans. The rst is a short in which he interviews an old man who, as a
child, met Jos Mart himself, when he landed in Cuba in 1895 to enter
the war against Spain; the second is a report on Cubas new educational
system. Adjectives to describe Fidels manner in these lms trip o the
tongue: spontaneous, warm, intimate, uninhibited, humorous. We rec-
ognize a kind of behavior quite untypical of political leaders, which,
 240 The Revolution in the Documentary

however, in the coverage of U.S. presidential campaigns, is quite calcu-

latedly staged.
How can we be sure that in Fidels case it is everything that it seems
to be? There is a signicant piece of evidence in each of these two lms,
in one case in the language, in the other in the image. Fidels closeness
to the people he meets is generally to be remarked in the mutual use of
t, the ordinary singular you in Spanish, instead of the more polite
Ustedexcept that, in Mi hermano Fidel, Fidel throughout addresses
the old man, who fails to recognize him because of his poor eyesight, as
Usted, as a mark of respect. The evidence of the camera is equally subtle.
Fidel tends fairly frequently to look at the camera (and there is no at-
tempt to cut these shots out; in Mi hermano Fidel they even become a
visual leitmotiv). When he does so, we feel the same searching eyes we
observe as he listens to the old man and others with whom we see him
engaged in conversation. We get the impression that he behaves toward
the camera just as if it were another person. I have heard it remarked
that people who treat cameras like people tend to treat people like cam-
eras, but in Fidels case the quip misres, because we can see nothing
calculating in these looks, only the signs of curiosity and attention
and the gift of entering into the moment, like the way, in La nueva es-
cuela, he joins in with the schoolchildren in games of baseball, volley-
ball, and table tennis. It is perfectly evident from this last-mentioned
sequence that Fidel is a man with a highly competitive spirit; he likes to
winhe was a prominent sportsman in his schooldayshe enjoys his
stardom. It is also evident that there is a strong paternalistic element in
his relationship to the children. But something else also comes across in
this sequence, which is also strong in De Amrica soy hijo . . . , namely, an
easy familiarity, and a total absence of fear in these encounters by ordi-
nary people with the leader.

In 1969, lvarez made a lm that re-created cine militante: Despegue a

las 18.00 (Takeo at 18.00). Slow dance music and images of blood pul-
sating through veins, then phrases and words appearing on the screen
one by one and advancing toward the viewer: you are going to see /
a film that is / didactic / informative / political /
and . . . / pamphleteering . . . / about a people / in revolu-
tion / anxious . . . / desperate . . . / to find a way out of /
an agonizing / heritage . . . / underdevelopment. The words
 The Revolution in the Documentary 241

give way to a picture of a thatched roof and the camera zooms out to
reveal a large barn being pulled down. Another title appears, the words
inscribed within a circle: if we were blockaded / completely /
what would we do? The camera zooms into the dot of the ques-
tion mark. stop production? / fold our arms? The image
changes to an old map of the Antilles with drawings of sailing ships
covering the seaan icon of colonialism. The music changes to a
Cuban danzn (traditional urban popular dance music) and the credits
roll. (The music is again by Leo Brouwer.)
The credits end and the image cuts to a sign outside a shoe shop. The
camera pans along a queue of people as the music passes into a minor
key, like a blues. Then theres another queue, this time people waiting
for bread. Street sounds are mixed in, and the frame freezes on a face.
Faces and hands are seen in slow motion. Close-up of an old woman;
again the frame freezes, and a caption is superimposed: no hay (There
isnt any). The caption repeats itself several times, intercut with a woman
gesturing with her forenger as if to reiterate the caption. More special
optical eects: the picture jumps from one freeze-frame to another of
the womans gesture and grimace. The eect is repeated with another, as
if in conversational reply. Strange whistling sounds in the music inter-
pret what they are saying. An old couple shrug their shoulders and the
same caption appears again: no hay. Then, without warning, another
image altogether: the eagle being toppled from the monument erected
in Havana by the United States in the early years of the Republic, a sym-
bolic piece of newsreel from the rst years of the Revolution, a repudia-
tion of servility to the United States. Then a strange engraving of a
Chinaman lying horizontal, his clothing covered with images of various
animals and objects. The captions now spell out what there isnt any
of: there isnt any illiteracythere isnt any prostitu-
tionthere isnt any unemploymentthere arent any desti-
tutesthere arent any homelessthere are no lotteries
theres no poliotheres no malaria.
These opening moments of Despegue a las 18.00 demonstrate what
happens when lvarez applies the virtuosity he has developed to the
full in LBJ to the mobilization of workers in Oriente province in April
1968, a trial run for the kind of mobilizations that were being planned
for the whole country in the battle to increase agricultural production
and especially the production of sugar cane. Turning from the enemy
 242 The Revolution in the Documentary

Despegue a las 18.00 (Santiago lvarez, 1969)

back to the Revolution, lvarezs restlessness takes on new energy. He

rst calls his audience to attention, and then teases them, almost un-
fairly (If we were completely blockaded . . .as if they were not
blockaded!). He coaxes and cajoles the audience with images of the daily
reality of the eects of the blockadethe ration lines. It is not presented
as reportage or newseveryone knows this already. Nor are these
images any apology for hardship; they are the very reality of it. With his
expressionist stretching of the image, lvarez means his audience to re-
experience in their cinema seats the grind of their daily lives, in order to
launch from here into a piece of emblazoning agitational propaganda
that reinvents the whole idea of propaganda and agitation. Not for noth-
ing has lvarez commented on the inventiveness of advertising tech-
niques. But rejecting the ways, if not all the means, of advertising, his
wish is not to replace the propaganda of the marketplace with some
kind of socialist equivalent. He wants to engage the audience on their
own territory.
Only the fainthearted will blench at the parallel the lm draws be-
tween mobilization for production and mobilization for war. The lm
analyzes the strategy (to which, as an agitational work, it also belongs it-
self) needed to engage in a battle. When Fidel in a speech talks of the
 The Revolution in the Documentary 243

demanding opportunity the Revolution has created for Cuba, which

asks people to work like animals so that they need no longer work like
animals, and he compares this with the misery that continues in the
rest of Latin America, the lm takes in images of Bolivia, Brazil, Guate-
mala. Fidels voice gives way to a song by Silvio Rodrguez, one of the
Nueva Trova, the Cuban New Song Movement, which takes up a theme
from Fidel: Four thousand a minute, ve million a day, two thousand
million a year, ten thousand million the century, for every thousand
who overow the earth one of them dies, a thousand dollars a death,
four times a minute, this is life. Sharks teeth have never come cheap.
This comes from the Second Declaration of Havana, presented by Fidel
for popular ratication at a mass meeting in Havana on February 4,
1962, and, like the First Declaration, an answer to the anti-Cuban pro-
nouncements of the Organization of American States (OAS), in this
case at its meeting at Punta del Este a few days earlier.
Despegue a las 18.00 is not one of the lms by which lvarez is known
abroad. It is a lm directed so specically to an internal need that out-
side Cuba the context is lacking to grasp it properly, though it is obvi-
ously a tour de force anyway. In the same year, however, lvarez, now at
the height of his creative powers, produced another work that has justly
been internationally appreciated. 79 primaveras (79 springs) is an incom-
parably poetic tribute to Ho Chi Minh. A lm of twenty-ve minutes,
the title refers to the Vietnamese leaders age at the time of his death. Its
form is that of a biographical rsum of the principal dates in Ho Chi
Minhs political life. The decorative titles that announce these dates are
interspersed among archive footage and other intertitles, inscribed with
lines of poetry elegiacally assembled. Again, the opening is beautifully
constructed: rst there are slow-motion shots of owers opening, then
a shot of bombs dropping almost gracefully through the sky. Then the
screen goes blank and we hear the human cry of a singer. After the rst
credit, a negative image of the young Ho Chi Minh appears, which trans-
forms itself into a positive image and then dissolves into close-ups. Be-
cause these close-ups are relmed, they have become somewhat grainy
by now a familiar eect in lvarezs language, which gives a gain in the
plasticity of the image and reminds you of its material nature. We see
Ho Chi Minh aging, the image returns to the negative, the screen turns
a brilliant white, and the titles resume.
At the end of the credits, which incorporate moving pictures of the
 244 The Revolution in the Documentary

Vietnamese leader, we come to a close-up of him sitting in the open air

at his typewriter. A title: They tied my legs with a rope, followed by a
shot of him washing his feet. Another: And they tied my arms, followed
by a close-up of his hands rolling a cigarette. I gave my life to my peo-
ple, and a shot of Ho at a house in the jungle. An army band playing at
his funeral. The simplicity of it.
When the biographical rsum reaches the victory of Dien Bien Phu,
the lm begins to shift gear. The Internationale is heard and we see
the faces of international communist leaders at the funeral. We cut to a
popular Cuban singerThe era is giving birth to a heart, it is dying of
pain and can stand no moreand her audience of cheerful Vietnamese
children. The scene is violently interrupted by bombs and the devasta-
tion of napalm. Over horric images of childrens burned faces and
bodies the music becomes violent and discordant. A title declares: they
began to kill in order to win. Then, in slow motion, one of the
most infamous images of the Vietnam War, a couple of North American
soldiers beating a Vietnamese who has collapsed on the ground: we see
feet and hands and the rie butts of his attackers, but not their faces.
Then: and now they kill because they cannot win. No one
has ever commented on Vietnam with greater economy or dignity.
The portrayal of the war continues with shots of antiwar demonstrators
in the United States with placards that unequivocally establish a univer-
salizing message: vietnam, watts, its the same struggle; avenge
che; fuck the draft. Then another of the most notorious media
images of Vietnam, a pair of GIs taking souvenir snapshots of their vic-
tims on the battleeld, to which lvarez appends another piece of poetry
by Ho Chi Minhand in these lines the lm knits its imagery together:

Without the glacial winter, without grief and death,

Who can appreciate your glory, Spring?
The pains which temper my spirit are a crucible
And they forge my heart in pure steel.

At this point many a lmmaker would have been content to con-

clude. Not lvarez, who has the nerve, or better, the cheek, to proceed
with more scenes of the funeral, set to the music of Iron Buttery. This
is not simply a grand aesthetic gesture. The lm was made in a period
when, once again, sectarians were vocal, condemning the importation
of music from the metropolis and those who were inuenced by itone
 The Revolution in the Documentary 245

79 primaveras (Santiago lvarez, 1969)

of those they attacked was Silvio Rodrguez. lvarez dees them, picking
one of Silvios songs for Despegue . . . , making solidarity with the North
American music of popular protest in 79 primaveras.
And then comes the coup de grce. A new title appears: dont let
disunity in the socialist camp darken the future. Using
animation, the title is torn apart into little pieces, which slide o the
edges of the frame to leave the screen blank. The music disappears. A
gunshot announces a split-screen, multi-image sequence of war footage,
freeze-frames, scratches, sprocket holes, ashes, guns, planes, bombs,
sounds of battle with electric keyboard noises on the sound track, in
which brutal reality bursts through the limits of its portrayal on celluloid
in an unrelenting and terrifying assault that ends in the annihilation of
a freeze-frame, which burns up before our eyes, leaving a blank white
screen. And then? The torn pieces of the title reappear and join up again.
The picture cuts to rockets ring, to the accompaniment of energizing
music by Bach, bursts of gunre ash across the screen, the owers
reappear, and a nal title appears: the yanquis defeated we will
construct a fatherland ten times more beautiful.
After seeing this lm, lvarezs revolutionary aesthetic comes into
the clearest focus. Having banished classical rhetoric in LBJan
 246 The Revolution in the Documentary

achievement dependent on its prior masteryand having invented agi-

tational propaganda anew in Despegue . . . , he now explodes the cine-
matic image itself. Yet this is something very much more than theoretical
deconstruction. For one thing, what he does is not theorized, it is the
product of the aesthetic logic he has been working out from one lm to
the next, it answers to expressive, not theoretical needs. lvarez cannot
be called a deconstructionist lmmaker, though in his practice he seems
to know more about deconstruction than the most eloquent theorist.
He is, stylistically, something of an expressionist, almost the spiritual
descendant of the expressionists of the rst decades of the twentieth cen-
tury whose revolutionary aesthetics thrust art into the modern world
but with this dierence, that in lvarez, the temper of the individual
and of the collective coincide. His idiom is deeply personal, like that of
any major artist of integrity, but at the same time it is a completely pub-
lic form of utterance, cleansed of the shit of individualism. In lvarez,
the individual is fully submerged in history.
The result is that lvarez also knows better than many of us who live
in the belly of the monster the truth about the cinema and its place
within the military-industrial culture of imperialism: that everything
we hate about it, its lies, its arrogance, its preachments about what is
popular, and the childish mental age it projects upon its audience, its
pornographic pandering to the caprice of the marketplace, all this be-
longs to the same stable as the soldiers who shoot their victims with
guns and then with Kodaks. Nevertheless, everything we hate about the
screen to which we entrust our dreams is redeemable, but only on con-
dition that there be openly displayed in the oppositional lm what the
lms of the enemy try to hide: their political provenance. The most
experimental techniques can then be freely explored without sacricing
communicability; indeed, the opposite. But there is a corollary: if these
techniques are used, as they are by many avant-garde lmmakers, with-
out marrying them to a clear political purpose, nothing at all can be
gained. On the contrary, such lms can only reinforce the breakdown of
communication that they pretend to expose.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Current of Experimentalism

A revolutionary cinema committed to the demystication of its medium

is sooner or later bound to confront the question of the image of the
hero and the revolutionary leader in all its aspects. The rst to explore
the image of heroism was Garca Espinosa in El joven rebelde, which
created an anti-militarist paradigm. The idea of heroism was to be ac-
tively deconstructed in the early 1970s by Manuel Herrera in his major
documentary Girn. At the moment when lvarez made Hasta la victo-
ria siempre in 1967, something dierent was required. The lms very
function was to eulogize the heroic revolutionary martyr, and the quality
of lvarezs creativity produced a way of doing this at once original and
innovatory, and as vibrant with revolutionary fervor as the oratory that
served as its model. The poetry of the lm partly comes from the way
the screen is given over to reproductions of Ches image. This succession
of images of diering quality creates an eect akin to deconstruction,
largely arising from the eect that relming the images has on fore-
grounding their material quality as reproductions, signiers of what is
absent. Which is to say that lvarez does not engage in this exercise for
its own sake, but for its metaphorical signicance, the sense of loss in
the photographic imprints a man has left behind conjuring up his pres-
ence in the hour of his death; to make people realize that this is all that
is left of himhis captors have secreted his body awaybut its enough
because its everything: his living example. The same theme was later
treated in another documentary, made in 1981 by a Chilean lmmaker
exiled in Cuba, Pedro Chaskel, which uses only the image of Che that

247
 248 The Current of Experimentalism

spread around the world like wildre in 1968, replicated on banners and
posters held aloft at the countless demonstrations of that fateful year, an
image taken from what is not only one of the most famous photographs
of the twentieth century, but one of the few that truly deserve that much-
overused epithet iconic. A highly poetic lm essay, the tone of this
lm is signaled by the title, Un foto recorre al mundo, literally, A photo
goes around the world, which in Spanish evokes the opening words of
the Communist Manifesto.
The history of this photograph, which has only recently come to light,
speaks directly of the public creation of iconic imagery of revolutionary
heroism. It was taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960, on assignment
for the newspaper Revolucin (later Granma) at the protest rally the day
after the explosion of the Belgian freighter La Coubre in Havana harbor
that killed more than a hundred dockworkers (see chapter 6). At the be-
ginning of Chaskels lm, Korda (who for ten years was Fidels ocial
photographer) remembers how he took it: it was a damp, cold day, and
he was panning his Leica across the gures on the dais, searching the
faces with a 90 mm lens, when Ches face jumped into the viewnder.
The look in his eyes startled him so much, he said, that he instinctively
lurched backwards, and immediately pressed the button. A moment
later Che was gone. Another time he added, There appears to be a mys-
tery in those eyes, but in reality it is just blind rage at the deaths of the
day before and the grief for their families.1 The newspaper put the pic-
ture on an inside page, leaving the front page for a photo of Fidel. Seven
years later, he gave a copy to the left-wing Italian publisher Giangiacomo
Feltrinelli (the man who rst published Doctor Zhivago in the West, and
who died in 1972 in mysterious circumstances when he was blown up by
a car bomb). A few weeks later, Che was captured and killed in Bolivia
and became an instant martyr. When Castro addressed a memorial rally
in the Plaza de la Revolucin, Kordas photo was used to create a mural
to adorn the side of a building facing the podium where Castro spoke; it
is still there. Feltrinelli instantly spotted the value of the image, putting
it on the cover of the publication of Ches diaries and handing it over to
be used on posters, which were soon being carried through the streets
in the worldwide revolutionary protest marches of 1968.
In part, this image of the noble guerrilla, with tilted beret and owing
locks, derived its potency from another: the press photo of Ches body
laid out on a slab by the Bolivian military who captured him, framed
 The Current of Experimentalism 249

and angled to imitate Mantegnas Dead Christ. Kordas photo seemed to

constitute a reply: Che lives, deant as ever. The image thus took on a
life of its own, rapidly spreading from posters and banners to T-shirts
and album covers. Supposing the photo to be in the public domain, it
was soon taken up by advertisers targeting youth until it rivaled the
Mona Lisa as perhaps the most replicated image ever. Korda received no
royalties. Feltrinelli had used the photo without his permission, and
even failed to credit him as the photographer.2

In the same year as Ches death appeared another lm that treated the
question of the image of the martyred revolutionary hero to an exhaus-
tive and very dierent investigation, perhaps the most substantial it has
ever had in documentary form. The product of three years research and
production, and the biggest documentary project at that time mounted
by icaic, David, directed by Enrique Pineda Barnet, is a lm of 135
minutes on the subject of Frank Pas, a leader of the July 26th Move-
ment in Oriente province who was captured and killed on the streets of
Santiago de Cuba in 1957, after an informer had told the police where he
was hiding. His murder sparked o a wave of unrest and Santiago was a
city in mourning when he was buried the next day in a July 26th Move-
ment uniform with the rank of colonel.3 David was Frank Pass nom-
bre de guerra, his clandestine name.
What they did not want to do was simply make an outsize biography.
They wanted not just to study the character of a hero but also to break
the schema of the hero as a universal and infallible example. To ght the
idea of the guapo and the comecandela4 Latin American slang words
for tough guy. They wanted, he says, to break the fetishism of such
images, demystify too the dogmatic and melodramatic schematization
of certain radio and television programs, which present young people
with unachievable models of superhuman heroes. They wanted a lm
that would promote discussion about this, which therefore had to main-
tain a position of marked protest against the formulas and ritual of the
stereotype, without forgetting that the traditional relation of the specta-
tor to the screen, the ambience of cinema, the immediacy of the image,
and the ease of emotional identication with it all conspired against
them. This in turn they took to mean that they had to nd for the lm a
form that was neither horizontally nor chronologically linear, but that
developed a dynamic series of contradictions that would expand along
 250 The Current of Experimentalism

the length of the lm, without, however, reaching the normal closure of
a passive and conservative dramaturgical method.
Method was the problem they felt themselves facing. This problem
they sought to resolve by assembling, along with all their material, ideas
from a wide range of sources in both cinema and theater that might
serve as paradigms for the endeavor. They found them in Jean Rouch
and Edgar Morin, in Chris Marker, and in the Danish documentarist
Theodor Christensen, who made a lm on women, Ellas (They [femi-
nine]) with icaic in 1964, in Ivens, Kadar and Klos, Rosi, Godard, Vis-
conti, even Preminger, as well as Brecht, Piscator, and Stanislavsky.5
The theatrical paradigms held a special interest for Pineda Barnet.
Here he saw a solution, a reply to the conspiracy of cinema to maintain
the passivity of the spectator, in the idea of using the dialectical permuta-
tion of the epic and dramatic elements of the narrative to transcend the
level of anecdote. The results of this approach can be seen in the opening
section of the lm. At the very start, a sense of pending investigation of
a mystery is communicated by shots in which the camera tracks up on
objects surrounded by darkness, followed by sections of interviews from
which emerges the shape of a shadowy gure to whom is attributed the
words, Nobody understands me. Im tired of so many things. I want to
go and meet other people. Some interviewees say that Frank was a
churchgoing personand a Presbyterian, not a Catholicothers that
he was a man of action. A caption gives us a date: March 10, 1952. The
lm signals this as a time of disorder and topsy-turvydom in the form
of a lm clip, a musical with the singer singing in the broken English
accent of a Latin American, with Spanish subtitles. An archive montage
of the period ends with demonstrations at the University of Havana.
Whereupon we see a blackboard, with a text written on it, from Marxs
Theses on Feuerbach, about Feuerbachs failure to understand the social
relations within which the individual lives.
For Desiderio Blanco, writing in the Peruvian lm journal Hablemos
de Cine, David is an example of cine encuesta incorporating the proce-
dures of both direct cinema and classical montage, which creates a coher-
ent universe around its absent subject more eectively than Jean Rouch
created in the world of Chronique dun t. The lm, to be truthful,
is overlong, but it is another early example in Cuban cinema of a new
idiom, which in Spanish might be called cine desmontajewhat is
 The Current of Experimentalism 251

known in the radical independent lm movements of the metropolis as

post-Brechtian deconstruction.
Experience, especially in Europe, has shown that this kind of cinema
tends to inordinate length. It has also shown that while aiming to acti-
vate the audience, very often it becomes paradoxically unassertive and
passive. It is therefore not surprising to nd Jos Massip, in expressing
the general response to the lm in a review in Cine Cubano, saying:
I do not think that David, aesthetically speaking, can be considered an
accomplished piece of work. Its principal defect is the passivity of its
structure, and even more so its language. However, this passivity is a
result of the lms great virtue, which makes it the most important in
our feature-length cinema at the moment: its audacious and intense
approach to the revolutionary reality of Cuba. This paradox of passivity-
audacity, a true example of the law of the unity of contraries, which
makes up the most characteristic facet of David as a work, is nothing
other than the expression of a contradiction between form and content.6
The lm indeed left its audiences disoriented. Some remember that
they came out of the cinemas disconcerted and a bit frustratedthey
had not been given the emotional charge they had come to expect in
the lms of lvarez; they had not been made to cry and laugh (in this
respect, the lm did not exactly live up to its Brechtian model either).
But a little later, it happened that people began to talk about the person-
ality of Frank Pas. Whatever its deciencies, David made a strong im-
pression, and Massip prophetically declared that it initiated a new stage
in the Cuban feature-length lm.
For the Cuban ctional lm, the three years that Enrique Pineda Barnet
spent in making David were transitional years. From the years 1966 and
1967 there are four lms of signicance: Toms Gutirrez Aleas La
muerte de un burcrata (The death of a bureaucrat, 1966); Humberto
Solss Manuela (1966); Tulipa (1967), directed by Manuel Octavio
Gmez; and Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin (The adventures of Juan
Quin Quin, 1967) by Julio Garca Espinosa. All are full-length and black
and white, except for Manuela, which is only forty minutes, and was
originally intended as part of a three-episode lm by dierent directors
but was judged to merit release on its own. In both Manuela and Tulipa
the title role is that of a woman and the lm is a drama. The other two
are comedies.
 252 The Current of Experimentalism

La muerte de un burcrata is about a country that has made a revolu-

tion and decided to become socialist and therefore insists that its bureau-
crats provide equal treatment for all, including the dead: a corpse gets
itself unburied for the sake of bureaucracy, and then nds that bureau-
cracy wont let it be buried again. The country where these events take
place is a hilarious mixture of revolutionary Cuba and the Hollywood
land of comedy.
The story is very simple and ingenious. A man dies and his family
buries him. Afterwards they are asked for his carnet laboral (labor card)
for the bureaucratic process to take its course, but unfortunately they
buried it with him as a mark of honorhe had been considered a model
worker. To recover the card, they dig up the body in the dead of night.
Unable immediately to rebury it because the cemetery keeper has been
scared and sent for the police, they take it away and return next day to
bury it afresh. The bureaucrat in charge refuses them permission to do
this on the grounds that they have nothing to show that the body is not
where it is supposed to bein the ground. They need a certicate of
exhumation. The lm pursues the eorts of the corpses nephew to get
one. When he nally has it and returns to the cemetery, the same ocial,
following the same logic, still does not let him rebury the corpse because
he takes the certicate as an order to exhume it. Whereupon the exas-
perated nephew, who has already been chased through an oce build-
ing by a throng of pursuers, and has balanced precariously on a parapet
above the crowds, even hanging from a clock like Harold Lloyd, loses
patience and strangles the bureaucrat. For this misdeed he is taken away
in a straitjacket while the lm ends with the bureaucrats funeral.
Alea discovered after making the lm that the seminal idea had a
counterpart in reality, when a woman left a screening of the lm in
tears, because her husband had, as in the lm, been buried with his carnet
laboral.7 In the lm, the story has been elaborated to provide innumer-
able opportunities to parody Hollywood comedy. Whether or not Alfred
Hitchcocks The Trouble with Harry of 1955 was part of its inspiration,
Alea borrows liberally from practically the whole Hollywood comedy
tradition, with especially pungent plagiarism of Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel
and Hardy, and Harold Lloyd, as well as references to Jerry Lewis and
Marilyn Monroe. It is almost as if Alea felt a need to exorcise the Holly-
wood comedy, although since the great tradition of lm comedy is itself
 The Current of Experimentalism 253

La muerte de un burcrata (Toms Gutirrez Alea, 1966)

subversive of genre, this is not a cinema that needs to be repudiated in

the same way as the rest of Hollywood.
There are other comic strands to the lm as well, especially a streak
of black humor about death, which struck some Cuban critics as Mexi-
can in character, though Alea himself considered it rather more Span-
ish.8 Either way, there are certainly echoes of Buuel, in small surrealist
touches like the driver of the hearse with a plastic skeleton hanging in
the cab, or the dog during the ght in the cemetery that runs o with a
bone. Black humor is also the home key of several entire scenes that turn
on the consequences that everyday problems may create for an unburied
corpse. Since, for example, the family is forced to keep the corpse at home,
neighbors pool their ice to keep it fresh; but ice, like other commodities
in blockaded Cuba, is in short supply, and vultures circle overhead.9
The Cuban critics found the acts of homage to the masters of comedy
truly delightful. They also found the lmnot surprisinglysome-
what Kafkaesque.10 As Alea was about to depart with the lm to the
Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czechoslovakia (where it shared the Spe-
cial Jury Prize with La Vie de Crateau by the French director Jean-Paul
Rappenneau), he was asked if, perfectly lucid as it was for the Cubans,
 254 The Current of Experimentalism

the lm would be found intelligible there. Indeed, yes, he replied, not

mincing words, the bureaucracy thing is very old. It was not invented
but inherited, and in some cases enlarged, by the socialist countries,
where it seems like an oppressive stage that has to be passed through. I
think the mechanisms of bureaucracy as theyre shown here can be
understood anywhere.11 In Cuba itself, the lm was praised precisely
for its implacable criticism of bureaucracy, and the very high political
level it demonstrated in achieving this.
But theres another target in La muerte de un burcrata too. According
to Alea himself, Its a satire on rhetoric and the stereotype in art.12
Indeed, this is how the lm begins, with an animation sequence in
which the uncle whose death sparks the story o is killed when he falls
into a machine he has made to manufacture busts of Jos Mart. This
machine looks as if its been patched together in a fashion only to be
expected in a country where, as Ruby Rich observes, parts are unavail-
able due to the blockade and remedies left entirely to individual inge-
nuity.13 It is also reminiscent of the contraptions of the nutty profes-
sor Jerry Lewis, and reminded one Cuban critic of the machines in
Chaplins Modern Times.14 We started, Alea explained, with the busts
of Mart because they were the order of the daythats what I was crit-
icizing. I went out and took a hundred photos of Mart cornersthe
spots where the busts had been installed. Many looked cold and formal,
ocial, a ritualistic gesture. Others, in the popular districts, were often
primitively done and suggested veneration, of the same kind as popular
altars to the saints. These had an authentic popular character that isnt
shown in the lm.15 But this exclusion corresponds with the satires
target, for the lm is a weapon in the continuing ideological battle not
just against bureaucracy but also against the inuence of the bureau-
crats in art. The relevance of this kind of satire four years after Fidels
criticism of the political sectarians is evidence of how dicult it is to
uproot uncritical thinking in relation to art and culture. Nor was this
aspect of the lm lost on people. The critic Bernardo Callejas, the one
who saw the Mart bust machine as an echo of Modern Times, thought
this very appropriate because it is a satire on those who by dint of
mechanistic thinking cut themselves o from the thought of great men,
turning them into hollow symbols. The Mart-esque is not to be found
in the repetitious bust, but in the recovery of the Apostle from absurd
mystication.
 The Current of Experimentalism 255

Callejas ended his review of Aleas lm by announcing the premiere

of another new Cuban lm of interest: Solss Manuela. Manuela is a
guerrilla, a guajira, a peasant woman, who demonstrates that the quali-
ties needed to be a rebel soldier are not a monopoly of men but belong
to every true Cuban. The lm portrays her apprenticeship as a ghter in
much the same terms as El joven rebeldea process of learning to over-
come the ignorance of illiteracy and to call for justice rather than revenge.
At the beginning, when Batistas army razes the village where Manuela
comes from, and her mother is murdered, she seeks vengeance by at-
tacking a drunken soldier; by the end, she has become an advocate of
revolutionary discipline. The plot also revolves, however, around a rela-
tionship she develops with another ghter, Mejicano, a handsome guitar
player. The growth of this relationship is gently observed; she teases
him, for example, for his ineptitude at washing clothes. But we never
really stray far from the principal theme. After an attack on a village,
Manuela joins the villagers in calling for the informer to be lynched
and it is Mejicano who tells her, no, the man must be tried. Still, in be-
tween the duties of the struggle, they speculate about marrying when it
is all overthough here again it falls to Mejicano to tell her how dier-
ent things will then be (as we shall later learn when the same pair of
actors meet again in the last part of Solss next lm, Luca). In the end,
Manuela is fatally wounded in combat and this time Mejicano loses his
self-control, and it is she who has to remind him with her dying breath
to put aside thought of personal vengeance. The message of the lm
could hardly be clearer.
There is a certain justice in the criticism of the lm by a group of
Venezuelan critics, that if Manuela had been made ve years earlier it
would have been perfect, but for 1966 it suers from a certain lack of
ideological depth, and in its moral insistence remains somewhat senti-
mental.16 The image of the woman ghter is still romantic and ideal-
ized, and even in its antiheroism it makes no innovations. The dialogue
is bare, decient, though not, as far as it goes, incompetent, and the
result is that all but Manuela herself remain secondary and incomplete
characters, even Mejicano. What most impressed people at the time,
however, was the power and assurance of the lms visual style, which is
evident from the very rst moments, in the judicious lensing and framing
and the careful pacing, and above all in the controlled use of the hand-
held camera. The music, by Tony Tao, similarly alternates between
 256 The Current of Experimentalism

expressionism and lyricism. Compared with, say, Historias de la Revolu-

cin, Manuela shows the distance traveled in the stylistic evolution of
Cuban cinema in only a few years. Studio and studio lighting have been
abandoned and dress and makeup have become more naturalistic, even
if the stylization of character remains. But then Sols was only twenty-
three at the time he made this lm; even so, his characters already look
less like the visual stereotypes of the earlier lm. In the nal analysis,
the strength of Manuela lies in Solss having found himself an extraordi-
nary actress, Adela Legr, a campesina with no previous acting experi-
ence, to play opposite the young actor Adolfo Llaurad. At the same
time, the lm represented for Sols a return to public themes after the
experimental shorts he had been making for a couple of years, in con-
trast to which, he told an interviewer, Manuela represented cine rescate,
a recovery of national rather than personal values.17
While Manuela is not exactly a feminist lm, Tulipa, a circus story of
the 1930s or 1940s, is in this respect far more striking. Idalia Anreus,
who would become over the years the doyenne of Cuban screen ac-
tresses, plays the title role, an aging stripper in a side act in the circus of
Ruperto & Sobrino (Rupert & Nephew) who befriends a new recruit.
Beba, played by Daysi Granados, has been enticed to join the circus as a
dancer by the junior partner in the business, Cheo, the nephew, and
shes an eager recruit, for the circus seems to her a way of escaping from
home, which oers her no future. But she grows quickly disillusioned
when she discovers what kind of act Tulipa performs and realizes that
she is being groomed to take her place. If it wasnt you, Tulipa tells her,
theyd nd someone else. Ive been expecting this for some time. Go
on, drink. If youre going to enter show business youve got to get used
to it. Dont look at me like that. Youre staying, and thats it. And thats
the rst thing you have to learn: to sleep alone. Ive been sleeping alone
so long Im practically a seorita.
The lm is based on a stage work that Manuel Octavio Gmez saw in
the early 1960s, by Manuel Roguera Saumell, who then collaborated on
the script. The itinerant circus pictured here was a popular form of
entertainment in the countrysidethe early lm distributors Santos y
Artiga were also circus proprietorsand hence the lm was predictably
popular with peasant audiences. It was readily understood as an alle-
gory of the conditions of the time, a microcosm of the pseudorepublic
with its portrait gallery of the whole range of circus types, including the
 The Current of Experimentalism 257

owner who abandons it all when some more protable enterprise comes
his way. The lm is full of social critique, wrote one reviewer, and the
proles of the exploited circus personnel, from the bumpkin who raises
the curtains to the variety star, via the master of ceremonies, are com-
pletely faithful.18 Cheo, in the words of another, incorporates all the
primitive machismo of the Cuban man before the Revolution, his vio-
lence, his spiritual weakness.19 For this second reviewer, Tulipa is con-
fronted by Beba in whom she sees her own youth and at the same time
a rival. There is also the Bearded Woman Tomasa, in whom the actress
Tet Vergara shows the gentleness of the woman forced to live such a
role because poverty obliges her, but who has not been contaminated.
The lm is thus a study of struggle by individuals in the pseudorepublic
to live an authentic life, but it also goes further and becomes an exami-
nationunique in Cuban cinema at the timeof the particular modes
of exploitation that were forced upon these women, who stand for all
women in the pseudorepublic, and the solidarity they create between
themselves in order to survive; for, in spite of the threat that Beba repre-
sents toward Tulipa, Tulipa not only, like Tomasa, retains her dignity,
but the friendship that both the older women extend to Beba is the most
positive human value in this world.
At the same time, the male characters are not mere ciphers. On the
contrary, Tulipa is perhaps generally the best-acted Cuban lm up to
the moment it was made. This also extends to the crowd scenes, and the
honesty with which the contradictions of circus entertainment are pre-
sentedthe portrayal of the sexism of the circus, for instance, which is
located here quite specically as a deformation of a kind that arises in
the typical social relations of both the production and the consumption
of popular entertainment to be found in the pseudorepublic. In the
scene that rst reveals Tulipas act, the camera mainly holds back, at
rst because it is looking at the scene from Bebas point of view; but this
camera position fullls other functions too. It distances the spectator of
the lm from the spectacle, discouraging voyeurism and guarding our
respect for Tulipa, revealing instead the way the spectacle is designed
not to satisfy but merely to titillate. Finally, through the empathy the
lm produces for the three women, it also becomes an allegory on the
frustrations forced upon any artist in the circumstances. By using these
women as the vehicle of this allegory, Gmez marks the changing con-
sciousness of the artist within the Revolution in some important respects.
 258 The Current of Experimentalism

In a way, Tulipa stands halfway between Aleas La muerte de un

burcrata and Garca Espinosas Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin, Cuban
cinemas rst fully accomplished experimental feature lm, and signi-
cantly a comedy. This is a lm that was conceived in direct relation to the
problem of a growing crisis in communication, in which experimenta-
tion seemed to be becoming more and more urgent. Before the Revolu-
tion, Garca Espinosa explained in 1969, cinema entertainment was re-
garded by many people as escapism, but now the lmmakers could not
aord to think that way. However, a crisis of communication had devel-
oped because the serious lmmaker could hardly continue to employ
the traditional concept of art, a concept premised upon a split between
serious and popular in which the artist was left isolated in a self-
protective cocoon of elitism. The Revolution had made the need for
such self-protection an anachronism (as Fidel had argued in the Words
to the Intellectuals). But simply to try and exchange elitism for pop-
ulism was equally unacceptable. An entirely new mode of addressing
the audience was needed, combining entertainment with the critique of
the old forms of entertainment. This, for Garca Espinosa, was connected
with another challenge, that of learning how to avoid the tendency of
the Revolution to treat itself too solemnly: Which is not to say that the
processes of the Revolution are not dramatic; they are very serious, but
they dont have to be treated in a formalist way, which is when stupidity
begins.20 Juan Quin Quin was an attempt to confront these problems.
Like Tulipa, Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin was based on a recent
literary work, in this case a novel by Samuel Feijo titled Juan Quin
Quin en Pueblo Mocho. It was a novel in many ways suited to the task in
hand, evoking the popular Hispanic tradition of the picaresque, in which
the romantic hero is replaced by the rascal who lives o his wits. Yet, in
spite of the typically episodic structure of the picaresque novel, the
lmmakers felt it had too linear a structure for their purposes:21 a pair
of peasant woodcutters, Juan and his friend, pass through a series of
adventures that spur them to a toma de conciencia, a moment of en-
lightenment, that leads them to take up arms against an intractable
reality. The original adaptation proposed a familiar world in which the
picaresque aspect appeared as a cross between a western and a classical
adventure. This treatment was rejected, partly on grounds of length,
and they began to rework it, both eliminating characters and combining
 The Current of Experimentalism 259

them. In the process, they discovered a way of giving it a highly original

nonlinear structure.
The lm begins with a brief sequence that shows Juan Quin Quin at
war, burning cane elds, and being cornered by soldiers commanded by
a caricature mayor. This immediately gives way to Juan Quin Quin in
times of peace, in which our hero advances from being a rather too-
worldly acolyte in the service of a self-righteous priest, to becoming a
bullghter. But then we see him at war again, among a band of ghters
trying to break an encirclement by the enemy; Juans friend Jachero
escapes to try and bring help but meets with unexpected and gratu-
itous deaththough since the narrative is not linear, this does not stop
him reappearing during the rest of the lm. Next, it is revealed how
our hero met his sweetheart Teresawhile appearing in a circus act as
Jesus on the crossand also how he begins to rebel against the estab-
lished order, which he confronts in the shape of the manager of a sugar
mill and his North American paymaster. In the nal section, we learn
how Juan and his comrades form a small guerrilla band.
Not only is the narrative structure thus shaken apart and reassem-
bled in an apparently haphazard way, but in the process, each dierent
sequence has come to be treated as if it belonged to a dierent kind of
lm. Juans adventures thus become, as Anna Marie Taylor observed in
an article in Jump Cut, a series of escapades through dierent cinematic
genres.22 The lm begins like a cinemascope western; there are parodies
of the war movie and the detective picture with its wealthy oriental vil-
lain, and always there is the handsome hero, the beautiful heroine, and
the excitement of adventure. The parody even moves outside cinema
proper: Jachero meets his untimely end in a skit on the fotonovela, or
photonovel (a cross between the comic-book and the magazine love
story in which drawings are replaced by photographs staged to look like
lm stills, a cheap printed format that rst appeared just after the Second
World War in Italy and then found a market in Latin America).23 The
elaborate inappropriateness, as Anna Marie Taylor puts it, of the paro-
dies in Juan Quin Quin, succeeds in eectively calling attention to the
articiality and formulaic quality of the cinematic codes at work in each
case. . . . Distanciation eects used in the lms long series of adventures
require the viewer to be constantly aware of cinematic illusion as pat-
terned convention.
 260 The Current of Experimentalism

There are other purposes in this treatment too. As well as demon-

strating to the spectator that this is a lm and not reality, as Garca
Espinosa himself puts it, there was also the problem of how to ridicule
a number of typical elements of the adventure lm without being led to
satirize our own reality.24 So the lm foregrounds the trickery of edit-
ing and special eects in order to frustrate narrative expectation, to
subvert narrative logic, and to satirize genre by means of exaggeration.
A lion turns miraculously into a bull; character types from one genre
interpose themselves in another; Juan jumps o a roof to land ever so
conveniently on his horse. At the same time, there are interpolations on
the nature of underdevelopment. Among captions that come up like
chapter headings, such as Juan Quin Quin in Peacetime, How Juan
Quin Quin met Teresa, and so forth, are a couple that break the frame-
work: Here we could insert a number of scenes of daily life in Latin
America and We could equally show any one of the useless meetings
of the United Nations.
For Anna Marie Taylor, there is, however, an area of the reality of
underdevelopment that the lm still evades: Juans handsome demeanor
and cool, understated, Hollywood-style acting . . . hardly confront, let
alone undercut . . . audience identication, even with a comic hero . . .
the women are still dressed and act as exploited sex objects and Garca
Espinosas intent to satirize such roles cannot compensate for his more
or less straight reproduction of these sexist codes. And it is true that in
this respect Juan Quin Quin is less advanced than Tulipa.
However, the lms treatment of the idea of the hero has other com-
plexities. The problem as Garca Espinosa saw it was the antagonism
that exists between the dramatic idea of the positive hero (who is nally,
he observes, less interesting than the baddies) and the superciality of
the hero in the adventure genre. They belong to dierent aesthetic tra-
ditions. He wanted not to combine them, elide the one into the other,
but to expose the contradictionnot an easy thing, since questioning
genre isnt a pure, clean, abstract matter25 (which Anna Marie Taylors
criticism, of course, conrms). The problem revolved around the con-
cept of the toma de conciencia, the heros moment of enlightenment,
when the truth is revealed and his duty becomes clear. In both cinema
and literature this moment is always carefully constructed, and is cen-
tral to the ideological function of the work. It normally comes after the
hero has suered a series of defeats and disillusioning experiences
 The Current of Experimentalism 261

which the mechanisms of the genre are designed to provideand is

given the force of a psychological breakthrough. Indeed, the entire genre
philosophy of the good, the bad, and the ugly is based on a hypostatized
psychologya notion, that is, of psychological types and processes as
causes instead of eects. In this way, the realities of social history and
class struggle drop out of the picture; instead of the heros concienti-
zacin, a process of critical reection on the world that surrounds him,
genre cinema treats the hero to a sudden moment of revelation, not
unlike the decongestion of accumulated tension that Enrique Colina
and Daniel Daz Torres speak of in their analysis of the Latin American
melodrama.
The scene in which this comes to the surface is at the end of the lms
penultimate section, where Juan is being inspected by the North Amer-
ican paymaster of the sugar mill like a piece of livestock. A caption inter-
rupts the image, inscribed with a ridiculous sentence from a play well
known in Cuba and Latin America, Don Juan Tenorio, written by a Span-
ish romantic poet, Jos Zorrilla, in 1844. It reads: Llam al cielo y no
me oy (I called upon heaven and it did not hear me). Our hero has
lost his patience. He lunges at everyone in sight, and, jumping through
the window, departs to join the struggle. A second caption drives the
message home: y pues sus puertas me cierr (and it closed its doors
against me), after which it only remains for a third caption to state:
etc. etc. The rationale behind the choice of these lines is quite simple:
it clinches the preceding religious satirefrom Juan the acolyte to Juan
on the cross. For the lm is militantly atheistic. The sequence concludes
with a transitional caption to the nal section, quoting Fidel: There is
always armed struggle, but sometimes theyre the ones with the arms,
and its necessary that we have arms too. Evidently, this includes lms.

The experimentalism of Juan Quin Quin is an expression of currents

already found in various documentaries by Santiago lvarez and the
example of Pineda Barnets David. It also anticipated a series of major
ction lms of 1968 and 1969: Jorge Fragas La odisea de General Jos
(The odyssey of General Jos), Aleas Memorias del subdesarrollo (Mem-
ories of Underdevelopment), Luca of Humberto Sols, and La primera
carga al machete (The rst machete charge) by Manuel Octavio Gmez,
as well as others that came later, like Jos Massips Pginas del diario de
Jos Mart (Pages from the diary of Jos Mart) and another lm by
 262 The Current of Experimentalism

Alea, Una pelea cubana contra los demonios (A Cuban battle against the
demons), both dating from 1971. The sheer exuberance of all these lms
fuels an attack on stable and established lmic vision that has very few
precedents in the history of cinema. The attack takes shape most strik-
ingly, but by no means exclusively, in the matter of camera style and
cutting, especially in the rst part of Luca, in Una pelea cubana . . . or in
sections of the lm by Massip. In La primera carga al machete, Jorge
Herreras handheld camera combines with high-contrast black-and-
white photography in a swirling battle scene that takes place in a forest,
in which the battle consequently becomes an abstract image of pure
energy that reveals a high degree of tolerance for controlled visual chaos,
or, to put it more positively, for Gestalt-free form. According to the
teachings of Gestalt theory, the artist is primarily concerned with orga-
nizing perception into stable forms according to the laws of unity, seg-
regation, and balance, which reveal harmony and order, and stigmatize
discord and disorder. Ironically, this theory was being elaborated at
the very same moment that the modernist movement was engaged in
dramatically changing the rules, breaking down the traditional surface
structures of art to reveal complex relationships that refuse to be caught
in the stable and neat grid of orderly perception. Instead, according to
psychoanalysis, incompatible outlines and surfaces permeate and try to
crowd themselves into the same point in time and space.26 In this way,
traditional artistic languages, especially those of the plastic arts and
music, were revolutionized; similar experiments in the disruption of
the rational surface followed in every other art form. In cinema, how-
ever, this kind of avant-gardism found itself restricted to the margins by
the aesthetic intolerance of big money, or, in the Soviet Union, after the
experimentation of the 1920s, by the orthodoxy of socialist realism. The
fears that motivated this refusal of lmic experimentalism were not just
of the destruction of the naturalistic illusion and the realism eect, but
of the rupture of the exemplary nature of narrative. And indeed, the
subversion of traditional narrative is another major feature of this
extraordinary period in revolutionary Cuban cinema, which made a lot
of otherwise good-natured people very uncomfortable.
This experimentalism was by no means limited to cinema. There was
an experimental current alive around this moment in other art forms
too. Indeed, in painting it was the traditionand it was already a few
 The Current of Experimentalism 263

La primera carga al machete (Manuel Octavio Gmez, 1969)

years since Fidel had said, Our ght is with the imperialists, not with
abstract painters. In literature, there are various examples; 1967, for in-
stance, saw the publication by the writer Pablo Armando Fernndez
once assistant editor of Lunesof his best-known novel, Los nios se
despiden (The children say good-bye), which received a Casa de las
Amricas prize the following year. As one foreign commentator said of
it: With its kaleidoscopic treatment of time, its promiscuous blend of
the rhetorics of dream and technology, its characters that merge and
separate, its disembodied voices, Los nios se despiden is a modern clas-
sic.27 Other less spectacular kinds of literary experiment can be found in
testimonial literature like Miguel Barnets Biografa de un cimarrn
(The autobiography of a runaway slave) of 1968, where the author,
recording as an anthropologist the memories of a man of 108 years of
age, has turned them into a unique rst-person literary narrative of the
experience of slavery, escape, and participation in the Cuban Wars of
Independence, redolent of the cultural heritage, including their roots in
African religion, of the Cuban slave in the nineteenth century.
In music, too, there was more than one kind of experimentation going
on. Indeed, nothing symbolizes the spirit of the moment better than an
 264 The Current of Experimentalism

orchestral work in an advanced avant-garde style that Leo Brouwer

wrote for a modern music festival in Colombia, called La tradicin se
rompe . . . pero cuesta trabajo (Tradition is breakable, but its hard work).
It was also hard work breaking the hold of the contemporary musical
environment. Music was probably, except for cinema, the area of cultural
production most deeply aected by the processes of cultural imperialism
and the unstoppable invasion of the products of the culture industry of
the metropolis. In 1967, Joseph Klapper of cbs told a congressional
committee in Washington inquiring into Modern Communications
and Foreign Policy that the broadcasting of popular music is not
likely to have any immediate eect on the audiences political attitude,
but this kind of communication nevertheless provides a sort of entryway
of Western ideas and Western concepts, even though these concepts
may not be explicitly and completely stated at any one particular mo-
ment in the communication.28 Certainly, the Miami radio stations that
poured their ephemera into Cuba threatened to wreak havoc on popu-
lar musical sensibility, and, in 1968, in an excess of revolutionary fervor
of the moment, a ban was issued against rock music on Cuban radio
and television. The year was one of great revolutionary upheaval. Fidel
had launched a campaign to eliminate petty proteering, which swept
away the remnants of private trading such as stalls, bars, shops, and pri-
vate servicing; some of it was illegal, and among its eects there was
hoarding. A war was declared on indulgence, selshness, individual-
ism, parasitism, vice. In the course of events, the cabaretsthere were
dozens and dozens of them across the countrywere closed, and many
musicians found themselves without the usual places to play. For the
younger ones, experimenting with new styles, there were real problems.
Those at icaic, among others, felt that the ban on rock music was
misconceived, because it failed to comprehend the complexities of the
problem. For one thing, the moment was one of rejuvenation of popular
music in the metropolis itself, with groups and singers like the Beatles,
Bob Dylan, and many others. Much of the most interesting of this music
was known in Cuba not from the transmissions of U.S. radio stations,
from which a lot of it was excluded, nor even from records, which were
very dicult to get hold of, but from the circulation of cassettes, which
were just beginning to become available. Many people in Cuba found
this music appealing not only for its musical originality but also for
its voice of protest, against the war in Vietnam and the inhuman and
 The Current of Experimentalism 265

aggressive society that was conducting it; and a group of young musi-
cians emerged who began to take up the various styles of this music.
icaic, which until that time had mainly worked with classically trained
musicians, responded to the situation with the creation of the Grupo
Sonora Experimental (Experimental Sound Group), which brought
the best of the young popular musicians togetherincluding Pablo
Milans, Silvio Rodrguez, Noel Nicolaalongside instrumentalists like
Leo Brouwer, Sergio Vitier, and Emilio Salvador. Two workshops were
formed, one devoted to instrumental music and the other to the trans-
formation of popular song; and it was out of this initiative that the
Nueva Trova, the New Song movement, was born. A distinct and im-
portant ingredient was the discovery of a dierent popular music of the
moment in Brazilwhich came about, according to Alfredo Guevara,
partly through clandestine contacts with Brazilian revolutionaries.29
With its Afro-Brazilian provenance and the closeness to Cuban culture
of its rhythmic and melodic subtleties, the Cubans immediately under-
stood its mobilizing power.

There were, at this time, a couple of cultural events of the greatest impor-
tance that also gave expression to the militant desire for an experimen-
tal aesthetic. In July 1967, the Cuban government invited to Havana the
modernist Salon de Mai from Paris, an exhibition of European avant-
garde painting and sculpture, and a good number of writers and artists
with it. Then, at the beginning of 1968 came the momentous Havana
Cultural Congress on the theme The Intellectual and the Liberation
Struggle of the Peoples of the Third World, which brought together
about ve hundred revolutionary and progressive artists and intellectuals
from as many as seventy countries in a great act of armation. They
were, in the words of the Mexican Alonso guilar, intellectuals in the
broadest Gramscian sense: poets and dramatists, physicists and doc-
tors, actors and economists; old party militants and young people just
entering the revolutionary struggle; blacks and whites; Europeans, Asians,
Africans, delegates from Vietnam, India, Mexico, Algeria and Laos.30
The atmosphere of the Congress is vividly conveyed by Andrew
Salkey, in his book-length account Havana Journal. Participants joined
one of ve working parties on dierent aspects of the problems of cul-
ture, underdevelopment, national independence, and the mass media.
Salkey joined the group discussing intellectual responsibility in the
 266 The Current of Experimentalism

underdeveloped world and gives a very detailed report of its sessions.

The Cuban Federico lvarez read the opening paper, on the theme that
One kind of man is dying and a new kind is being born, and the intel-
lectual must assist in his birth:
Alvarez suggested that we must own up to Julio Cortzars dictum:
Every intellectual belongs to the Third World!
In reply, C. L. R. [James] objected to one of Alvarezs statements which
included the fact that Albert Schweitzer had contributed to the emanci-
pation and development of the Third World. C. L. R. also proposed that
all intellectuals, those from the developed world and those from the
underdeveloped, should be rmly discouraged, and in fact abolished
as a force.
Salon dead still. Consternation. Bewildered, silent delegates
everywhere.
Alvarez disagreed vehemently. He counter-proposed by saying that
the Third World has the right to make use of the nest intellectual
energy and benets which it can pluck from the developed world. He
said that the Third World does have to depend on the help, cultural
development, technology, wealth, good will, troubled conscience and
proved sincerity of the few countries of its choosing in the developed
world. It is vitally important, he advised, that the Third World learned to
pick and choose with great care and with enlightened self-interest.
Julio Cortzar of Argentina explained, succinctly, that the ivory tower
intellectual is dead.31
Thus the Congress proceeded through its eight days, with the Cubans
presiding over the thorniest sessions and acting as peacemakers with
great skill and tact.
C. L. R. Jamess call for the disappearance of the intellectual may have
struck his audience as shocking because it seemed out of step with what
might be called the tone of revolutionary existentialism of the Latin
American intellectual that dominated the intellectual style of the Con-
gress. The concept of the intellectual with which this philosophy oper-
ated was well articulated by the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti.32 To
begin with, the intellectual is seen as a nonconforming social critic, a
witness with an implacable memory. The type stands opposed to an-
other familiar Latin American, the man of action, the primary category
of machismo. The motivation of the man of action, whether political
caudillo or entrepreneur, army ocer or advertising agent, is the
search for a dynamic style in his way of life. Most of them, however, says
 The Current of Experimentalism 267

Benedetti, are the typical exponents of a dissolute conformism before

the most abject exigencies of the empire. To such a man of action, the
intellectual begins to acquire a certain ignominious reputation as the
passive observer, or the static being. But in fact, within the revolution,
the intellectual may fulll a new kind of activity: the anthropologist, the
linguist, or the ethnologist, for example, may play a decisive role in pro-
viding the guerrilla with real knowledge of the population in which a
foco is to be established. (One can also think of the role of the revolu-
tionary priest in a number of revolutionary movements across Latin
America.)
Also, of course, it falls to intellectuals to become guardians of truth.
If this is a somewhat unfashionable idea for postwar generations in Eu-
rope, it was nevertheless a European, Rgis Debray, who said, as quoted
by Benedetti: Militant is also he who in his own intellectual work ideo-
logically combats the class enemy, he who in his work as an artist roots
out the privilege of beauty from the ruling class. Explains Benedetti:
The truth is that neither beauty nor art is to be blamed for having
been monopolised for centuries by the social strata which had easy ac-
cess to culture. At the same time as it liberates the soil and the subsoil,
the Revolution also tends to put an end to the latifundists of culture, to
restore to the people its well-earned right of having access to beauty, of
ascending to good taste, of producing its own art.
Finally, the intellectual becomes, within the revolution, its vigilant
conscience, its imaginative interpreter, and its critic. But this word critic
is problematic, too ambiguous. There is a crucial dierence from bour-
geois society, where the critic, to be more than either apologist or mere
journalist and reviewer, is forced to take up an antagonistic stance. In
revolutionary Cuba, such a stance was by now liable to seem sectarian
and divisiveand this was something that worried not the functionaries
with their own sectarian susceptibilities, but other intellectuals, with a
better grasp of the movement of history. Aleas lm of the same year as
the Congress, Memorias del subdesarrollo, with its incapacitated and
unfullled writer as its antihero, and its self-enclosed roundtable dis-
cussion of intellectuals and artists, is very much about this struggle for
redenition by the intellectual, the struggle to pass successfully through
the desgarramiento, the rupture, that was spoken of by Roque Dalton
and Roberto Fernndez Retamar.33
 268 The Current of Experimentalism

Still, it is clear enough what Benedetti envisages as the role of the in-
tellectual within the revolution. The dichotomy between the intellectual
and the man of action is not to nd its solution in the intellectual be-
coming the amanuensis of the revolutionary, a coarse puppet of the
kind the bourgeois media love to ridicule. We must not create wage-
earners, docile to ocial thought, Che Guevara warned us, says
Benedetti. Nevertheless, the intellectual is to take on a certain role, like
that of the technician, the teacher, or even the athlete: a person with
particular skills, all of which are needed in the eort to create a new
kind of human being, a job just like any other.
Not that this really contradicts C. L. R. James. It is only a less shock-
ing way of putting things; for James is not talking of the intellectual
abdicating responsibilities but rather of a kind of self-propelled dissolu-
tion of the intellectuals privilegeswhich is also what ought to happen
in Benedettis scheme of things. Besides, what James has to say about the
Caribbean intellectual is very relevant. The West Indian intellectual, for
James, means such names as Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Frantz
Fanon; Bellay, Dumas pre, Leconte de Lisle, Jos de Heredia, Saint-John
Perse, Aim Csaire; the West Indian novelists, including Alejo Carpen-
tier and Wilson Harris; and the American revolutionary leader Stokely
Carmichael who was born in Trinidad. In the brief discussion paper
James presented to the Congress, which Salkey quotes in full, he explains:
This unprecedented role of West Indian intellectuals is due to the fact
that the population of an underdeveloped area uses highly developed
modern languages and, although many of us live at a level little above
that of slavery, the structure of life is essentially European. . . . That
situation has produced this tremendous body of intellectuals both in
politics and in literature whose climax has been attained in the Cuban
Revolution, embodied, for our purposes, in the work and personality
of Fidel Castro. . . . The Cuban Revolution tells us that the remarkable
contributions which the West Indian type of intellectual has made to the
emancipation of Africa and to the development of Western civilization
have now come to an end. This unprecedented capacity for creative
contributions to civilizations must not now be primarily applied abroad,
as formerly in regard to Africa, or to the development of French or
British literature; but it is in the application of this capacity to the life of
the Americas that the West Indian intellectual will nd the necessary
elements for the development of culture in the underdeveloped countries,
and this must not be forgotten in the developed countries as well.
 The Current of Experimentalism 269

For the artist of the metropolis, however, various diculties stood in

the way of a proper comprehension of the conditions of underdevelop-
ment. The whole historical situation seemed to go against it, as the
Mexican philosopher Adolfo Snchez Vsquez explained.34 There is a
powerful link, the philosopher argued, between revolutionary idealism
and aesthetic experiment. Artistic creation has long revealed a tendency
toward rupture and innovation whenever creative possibilities have fallen
into decadence and been exhausted. An artistic vanguard arises in oppo-
sition to the dominant aesthetic order, in order to ensure the continuity
of innovation and creative movement. The notion of a decadent avant-
garde is in this sense a contradiction in terms: there is, in fact, a denite
incompatibility in capitalist society between the artistic vanguard and
the social decadence that surrounds it. But the manner in which an artist
responds to this situation, and to the nature of the ideological machinery
that is brought into action against the avant-garde, is crucial. Several
historical phases can be distinguished. Surrealism, for instance, marks
the limits of protest of an artistic vanguard that, not wishing to accept
such conditions, attempts to draw closer to the political vanguard.
(Doubtless Snchez Vsquez is thinking here of the manifesto Towards
a Free Revolutionary Art written by his compatriot, the muralist Diego
Rivera, with the French surrealist Andr Breton, and Leon Trotsky as
their collaborator.) The ruling echelons, however, discovering that artis-
tic revolutions do not really endanger the body politic, learn to modify
their initial hostility toward the avant-garde. The rebellious artist is no
longer proscribed, but tempted instead, and provisions are made for
the avant-gardes incorporationbut only on condition that it remain
isolated from the broad populace. (This, one might add, is not too di-
cult, since the institutions of art, the galleries and museums, the dealers
and auctioneers have already isolated high art, allowing access only
through a protective and mythmaking grid that removes it from living
experience.) If the artist gives in, artistic rebellion is contained by social
conformism, and becomes the accomplice of the bourgeois order.
It would be false, says Snchez Vsquez, to reply to these conditions
with utopianism or voluntarism. Artistic revolutions cannot change soci-
ety. But nor should the endeavor be put aside or renounced in favor of a
search for lost communication by means of simplication or vulgariza-
tion. This way the vanguard can only negate itself. To remain true to the
 270 The Current of Experimentalism

drives that produce artistic revolutions, the artist is obliged to nd ways

of relating his or her work to the diverse currents of struggle for social
transformation; in fact, the artists revolutionary needs are double: to
dissolve the illusion that aesthetic revolution can be self-sucient, and
to show that political and social conformism are incompatible with
artistic creativity. Unfortunately, orthodox Marxist-Leninist politics,
both within and beyond the socialist camp, has contributed to the split
through a failure to think through properly the categories of progres-
sive and reactionary, and through a failure of imagination concerning
the possible meeting between aesthetics and politics. (Here one might
add: in spite of the successful work of Rivera, of Eisenstein and Vertov,
of John Hearteld, of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and quite a few
more.) Bourgeois ideologies have been able to exploit this situation by
encouraging the avant-gardes to try and preserve themselves from con-
tagion by politics, with the result that many artists close their eyes to
the real signicance and magnitude of the modernist revolution, and
turn instead to formalist and decadent preoccupations (whereupon they
cease to be a real avant-garde at all).
If this scheme sounds oversimplied, we need only remember that
Latin American society allows many fewer subtleties, and the character-
istics of the social formation are more starkly and clearly seenin the
same way that the very sight of rich and poor is starkly contrasted in
cities where mansions are overshadowed by shantytowns, and poverty
invades every street. In this kind of world, the Cuban Revolution had
brought about, said Snchez Vsquez, the modest beginnings of a pro-
found change, for it created the rst real experience in Latin America of
a revolution in an underdeveloped country, where the springs of popular
culture have not yet been alienated to anything like the degree of their
alienation and destruction in the metropolis. The Revolution opened
up a eld of action for the artist and intellectual, a potential inuence
in the creation of new cultural values of a kind no longer within reach
in the metropolisnot in the same way that the artist and intellectual
had a formative inuence a century and more ago. For Snchez Vsquez,
the Cuban Revolution was not only a creative act in itself, it also estab-
lished the conditions for art to become a social birthright, through cre-
ating a new base from which the dichotomies and antinomies of bour-
geois society could be overcome.
 The Current of Experimentalism 271

It also, he believes, showed that vital questions of art, such as freedom

of expression, are political problems that require of the artist a revolu-
tionary political commitmentbut again, of a kind that does not imply
a servile relationship to politics. Clearly, the function of the artistic van-
guard changes. In the rst place, the sudden acceleration that the Revo-
lution engenders places many traditional values in crisis through the
exertion of a new reality that demands novel forms of expression. At the
same time, the inertia of traditional forms intervenes, and to attack this
resistance, a new spirit of experimentalism is also needed. Inevitably,
there are problems. The new reality creates a new audience that is still
naive because only newly literate. The artistic vanguard therefore begins
to split into two again: some remain attached to experiment for experi-
ments sake, and take advantage of the revolutionary principles that
vouchsafe stylistic freedom; others, however, look to the application of
a critical consciousness for the creation of new forms, in which the tra-
ditions of the avant-garde can be preserved, only modied by the de-
mands of the new audience.
This whole argument is clearly allied to the position at icaic. It also
nds force in the connection to be found between this upsurge of exper-
imentalism in Cuba in the late 1960s and the wider political events of
the period, in particular the intensication of international struggle.
For the dierence between the two avant-gardesand not only in
Cubaor between what perhaps should be called the traditional avant-
garde and a new political-artistic vanguard, is nowhere more clearly to
be seen than in the response of the latter to international events, which
is usually entirely lacking in the former. There can rarely be found in
history as direct an artistic expression of political aairson the con-
trary, such connections are usually indirect and often delayed. But the
1960s were an exceptional decade, exploding in 1968 into months of
intense and violent agitation, protest, confrontation, and rebelliousness
right across the globe. In Europe, many intellectuals solemnly declared
their decision to commit suicide as a class. In Cuba, in April 1967, the
revolutionary body ospaaal (Organization for Solidarity among the
Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America) published the text of a mes-
sage from Che Guevara calling upon Latin American revolutionaries to
declare their solidarity with Vietnam, and to create two, three, many Viet-
nams in their own continent.35 Four months later, the Latin American
 272 The Current of Experimentalism

Solidarity Organization, olas, held a widely publicized conference in

Havana that declared the political, economic, and social unity of Latin
America to be far more signicant than the political divisions and an-
tagonisms in the continent.
Cuba had been gripped with an intense spirit of internationalism ever
since Che had departed the island in 1965 for new elds of battle, as
Fidel informed the people. Fidel, after Ches departure, gave continued
support to his ideas and their moral emphasis. It was, in any case, a
constant element in Fidels own thinking that the duty of a revolution-
ary is to make a revolution36 and that revolutionaries are not to be dis-
tinguished by adherence to scholarly principles, but rather, the best
textbook in matters of revolution [is] the revolutionary process itself.37
There were plenty, and not only on the right, who when Che was killed
in Bolivia accused the Cubans of the invention of a new revolutionary
dogma of guerrilla struggle. The Cultural Congress had already been
called when the event took place, and when the intellectuals gathered in
Havana, the spirit of deance was high. Fullling expectation, Fidel took
the opportunity in his address to the closing sessionwhich some
interpreted as a deant reply to criticsto praise the assembled com-
pany for the way the intellectuals had carried Ches banner to the rest of
the world after his death, when politicians and political organizations of
the left had failed to respond. And to the delight of the audience, he re-
peated his conviction that Marxism needs to develop, to break away
from a certain rigidity, to interpret todays reality from an objective,
scientic viewpoint, to conduct itself as a revolutionary force and not as
a pseudo-revolutionary church.38 The debates didnt cease after this,
any more than after the Words to the Intellectuals. A series of articles
appeared in Verde Olivo, the journal of the Cuban armed forces, directed
against refractory intellectuals. There was even, among some of them (if
they hadnt left), a stiening of attitude that was to cause further trouble.
But at icaic, the euphoria of experimentalism was in full ood.
 C H A P T E R T W E LV E
Four Films

Of the ction lms released by icaic in 1968, the most closely related
to the gure of Che Guevara himself is Jorge Fragas La odisea de Ge-
neral Jos. Premiered at the end of February, it was one of the rst of a
group of lms around the theme of the hundred-years struggle for
independence, which also included Luca and La primera carga al ma-
chete, the short ction El desertor (The deserter) by Manuel Prez, and
two documentaries, Sadermans Hombres del mal tiempo and 18681968
by Bernab Hernndez. These lms were more than a celebration of
the anniversary of the start of the Cuban Wars of Independence: they
constituted an extended essay in cine rescate, the recovery of history
from the suppression, distortion, and falsication to which it had been
subjected by bourgeois ideology. As Manuel Octavio Gmez expressed
it, they were lms that corresponded to a historical necessity to discover
the sources of Cuban nationhood, and the continuity between the birth
of the independence struggle and the nal achievement of national lib-
eration with the victory of the Revolution.1
Internationalism is a theme that repeats itself in several of these lms.
In General Jos, Jos Maceo and his brother Antonio are Dominicans,
not Cubans; nor were they the only foreigners to take part in the Cuban
struggle at one stage or another. The same is true of Che Guevara him-
self, of course, an Argentinian who was engaged in his last internation-
alist endeavor in Bolivia at the same time this lm was being shot. The
lm is based on an incident recounted in a letter by another indepen-
dence leader, Mximo Gmez, and further informed by a careful study

273
 274 Four Films

of Gmezs campaign diary.2 The incident in question occurred in 1895,

when Jos and Antonio landed in Oriente province with some twenty
comrades, to join the freedom ghters engaged in the new campaign
against the Spanish that had just been launched. A few days after the
landing, the group is surprised by an enemy ambush from which they
only just manage to escape, becoming dispersed in the process. Jos seeks
refuge with two or three others in the mountain forests where the lm
opens, hiding behind trees, using the undergrowth for camouage, to es-
cape the Spanish soldiers pursuing them.3
The identication of the camera with the pursued permeates and per-
vades the entire lm, but without any of the tricks that genre cinema plays
in such situations. Suspense is an alien posture to this lm. The bond
between the camera and the subject is of a completely dierent order.
After an exemplary scene in which the General shares with a compaero
an edible snail plucked from a bush, the group is once more attacked;
he himself makes an escape by jumping a precipice, but his companions
are either killed or captured. The camera now indissolubly attached to a
single man, it transxes him and becomes a wholly objective scrutineer
of his struggle against nature to survive. The intensity the lm takes on
in this portrayal invokes memories of King Lear shorn of all pretense in
the face of the tempest, or invites comparison with Kurosawas Dersu
Uzala and the solitary individual battling for survival against the full
force of natures might in the Siberian winter: here its a tropical forest.
For the Cubans, there was also shortly to be a more immediate source
of comparison. We had walked a kilometre, wrote Che Guevara in his
Bolivian diary (entry for June 16, 1967),

when we saw the men of the vanguard on the other side. Pancho had
found the ford and had crossed it while exploring. We crossed with the
icy water up to our waists and with some currentwithout mishap. We
arrived at the Rosita an hour later, where we noticed some old footprints,
apparently the armys. We then became aware that the Rosita was deeper
than we had foreseen and that there are no traces of the trail marked on
the map. We walked for an hour in the icy water and then decided to
camp so as to take advantage of the palmito de totai [edible top of the
palm tree, usually considered a delicacy] and to try and nd a beehive
that Miguel had seen while exploring yesterday; we did not nd it, and
ate only mote [dried corn kernels boiled without salt] and palmito with
lard. There is still food for tomorrow and the day after (mote). We
 Four Films 275

walked for three kilometres down the Rosita and another three down the
Rio Grande. Height: 610 metres.4

Miguel Benavides turns in a carefully measured performance as the

General, holding the screen alone for a large part of the lm, displaying,
as he confronts the hostile environment, the steel will and tenacity that
Fidel recalled in Che. When a cold wind begins to blow, he starts to
perform a weird kind of dance, running backwards and forwards and
beating his arms across his chest to keep warm; when it starts raining,
he crouches down to keep his bag and rie covered. In all of this, the
most memorable aspect of the lm, the camera is the actors most inti-
mate partner, counterpointed by the chatter of the forest on the sound
track, until, hungry and fevered, Maceo begins to hallucinate and meets
a corpse. The moment is one of highly charged ambiguity: is this his tor-
mented imagining or the real remains of another eeing guerrillero? The
Peruvian critic Nelson Garca Miranda nds this the rst occasion in
Cuban cinema in which the movement from the conscious to the un-
consciousattempted by several directorsis accomplished with the
same conviction as in (his example) Mizoguchis Ugetsu monogatari.5
Humberto Sols will achieve something similar even more eectively in
the rst part of Luca.

In Luca, Humberto Sols has interpreted the theme of the hundred-

years struggle in an entirely novel way to create an epic in three sepa-
rate episodes: each centers on a woman called Luca and takes place in a
dierent period of Cuban history, corresponding to the three stages of
colonialism, neocolonialism, and socialist revolution; the three episodes
also present us with Lucas of dierent social classes. In the rst, the
year is 1895, approaching the climax of the Wars of Independence, and
the milieu is that of the landed creole aristocracy. The second episode
takes place in 1933 at the moment of the abortive revolution in which
the dictator Machado was overthrown; this time Luca is a member of the
bourgeoisie. Finally, the Revolution, 196, and Luca is a rural peasant
girl, a member of a new agricultural collective.
A love story provides the basic plot for each episode: the rst is tragic,
the second melodramatic, the third a comedy. The rst and last are of
a richness that can only be called Shakespearean. This, and the lms
length (160 minutes) make it by far the most ambitious movie that icaic
 276 Four Films

had yet attempted, and the most expensive. Sols chose to make women
his principal protagonists, as in Manuela, because, he explained, The
womans role always lays bare the contradictions of a period and makes
them explicit. . . . Luca is not a lm about women; its a lm about so-
ciety. But within that society, I chose the most vulnerable character,
the one who is most transparently aected at any given moment by
contradictions and changes.6 This, he says, has nothing to do with fem-
inism per se. Nonetheless, the nal episode is directly concerned with
the problem of machismo . . . which undermines a womans chances of
self-fullment and at the same time feeds a whole subculture of under-
development.
On another occasion, Sols explained the germination of the lm. I
began to prepare Luca rapidly following the premiere of Manuela. The
present group of stories is not what originally appeared in the rst proj-
ect. Only the rst remains. The second and third (those concerning the
republic and the Revolution) were not accepted. In truth, it was a very
dierent lm from the present one. And Im really happy that the project
as a whole was not approved. Neither of the rejected stories has ceased
to interest me: a satire on the republic seen through a couple trying to
nd a place to make love one day in Santiago de Cuba, and a dramatic
story on the diculties of a pair of lovers (him married, her single) who
work in the same rm. But with the passage of time, I feel that the stories
that have been substituted for these give the lm a much richer and more
harmonious structure.7 Aesthetically, the most interesting thing about
the alteration is that not only have the stories been changed but the
positions of the melodramatic and the humorous episodes have been
swapped around. At the same time, the changes are a positive result of
the production system at icaic, where scripts are able to evolve through
criticism, which unsympathetic commentators describe as regimenta-
tion and censorship.
Luca 1895 beginslike the other episodeswith a paradigmatic
shot that presents the historical period in a dominant aspect, in this
case a town square framed to show its colonial architecture weighing
down upon the inhabitants. We are introduced to the daughters of the
aristocracy, lavishly dressed and parasoled, living a life of opulence, leisure,
gossip, and superciality. Several of the many accounts of the lm
Luca has been written about more than any other Cuban lm except
Memorias del subdesarrolloemphasize the European appearance of
 Four Films 277

Luca I, 1895, from Luca (Humberto Sols, 1968)

this group with its imported furniture, sculptures, photographs and

drapes and the envy displayed towards the new Parisian husband and
hat of a returning acquaintance.8 Luca herself, according to the most
substantial of these accounts, by the North American critic Stephen
Kovacs, is a spinster who stands at that delicate age where she is still
capable of falling in love but is already on the road to settling in to a
carefully circumscribed world of maidenhood . . . her company consists
only of her family and of other women of her class . . . while her friends
bubble with excitement at afternoon tea parties, she remains sedate,
smiling, accommodating.9 Playing the part, Raquel Revuelta, one of
Cubas leading stage actresses, displays, in Kovacss eyes, the linear fea-
tures of a classic Spanish prole. For the Peruvian critic Isaac Len Frias,
the similarity of her appearance to that of Dolores del Ro or Mara
Flix is not accidental, for we are in the world of 1940s Mexican melo-
drama crossed with Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights.10 Sols himself
has mentioned the inuence of the novels of Flaubert.11
Suddenly, in stark contrast to the comforts of the aristocratic setting,
there is a cut to a cart full of bloody, ragged bodies of soldiers making
its way through the streets, and the character of Fernandinaa bravura
 278 Four Films

performance by Idalia Anreus as the mad nun whose story parallels Lucas
as Gloucesters does King Lears. The tale of her brutal rape by Spanish
soldiers, which drove her mad, is told with morbid excitement by one of
Lucas companions, and we see it on the screen in surrealistic, over-
exposed shots, which Anna Marie Taylor describes as a dream-like alle-
gory, the rape of Cuba by Spain.12
As a virgin approaching middle age, anxiously hoping for a man to
appear to complete her social existence, Lucas life changes when she
meets Rafael, a Spanish dandy who professes love to her. The last ower
of an eete and doomed colonial culture, explains another commenta-
tor on the lm, Peter Biskind, Luca breaks away into the only alterna-
tive available to a woman of her class and time: She abandons herself
to a grand passion, to a myth of self-fullment . . . which is as derivative
in its way of a bygone Byronism as the nery of her class is imitative of
Paris fashions.13 Her happiness is shattered, however, by the rumor that
Rafael is a married man. She goes to meet him at an abandoned sugar
millan ambiguous location: Kovacs calls it a desolate monastery, a
Venezuelan critic a small abandoned fort.14 As Kovacs describes the
scene, Rafael tries to insist on his love for her. The genteel mood of
courtship is past. He looks darker, more menacing, desperate, as he chases
her amidst sombre stone walls. He throws himself upon her, attempting
to possess her at once. His energy spent, he retreats into a corner, like a
beaten animal, sobbing in the dark. Luca herself has changed: her di-
sheveled clothes and her hair in disarray indicate that she has come
closer than ever before to her own sexuality . . . she approaches reso-
lutely, tears his shirt and embraces him. Several critics have found this
an extraordinary scene, but too extended. For the Venezuelans, the way
the camera hugs the walls with Luca as she retreats before Rafaelthe
subjective camera in full ood againis an image of beauty as long as
its signication is fresh, but once exhausted it becomes precious. For
Daniel Daz Torres, the scene is one of the most beautifully achieved
moments of all, containing an almost perfect blending of the sentimental
and the visual, or of the sentimental-aestheticsome other ambiguous
term might do just as well, but again, it should have been shorter.15
What is certainly true is that there is something very uncomfortable
about this scene. Biskind remarks that in the fragile world of colonial
Cuba, far from Europe, [Lucas] gestures of passion become a strained
 Four Films 279

and unnatural parody of borrowed forms, a feverish mimicry of Conti-

nental literary romances. This could also be said of the very style of the
lm, except that it is perfectly deliberate in its feverish mimicry of the
grand style of directors like Visconti or Fellini.
Lucas passion is shattered, however, in a collision with historical
reality (as Biskind neatly puts it). Gradually, the political conict that
surrounds them inserts itself. As a guest at her house, Rafael purports to
have no interest in taking sides in the war, while she, on the other hand,
is a tacit supporter of the revolutionaries through her love for her brother
Felipe, who is organizing guerrillas on the family plantation. When Rafael
entreats her to take him to the estate, the full political drama unfolds.
As they approach their destination, the Spanish cavalry suddenly
emerges to wage battle on the guerrillas. As Rafael dumps her in the
middle of the Spanish troops he has led to the site, Luca realizes that he
has been using her to accomplish his task as a Spanish agent. The battle
claims her brother as a victim and, back in the city, driven mad with
shame and sorrow, she nds Rafael, dressed in Spanish uniform, and
publicly stabs him to death. The critics are generally agreed that this is
not just a murder for revenge, but the execution of the oppressor.
Sols has acknowledged Visconti as an inuence; the critics concur.
Biskind pins the model down to Senso, the tale of a high-born Italian
woman compromised by a desperate passion for an Austrian ocer that
leads her to betray her patriotic cousin and her country during the war
of Italian unication (though in Sols, Luca is more the victim than
Viscontis Livia, more a pawn of forces beyond her comprehension).
But if, says Biskind, the aair between the lovers is orchestrated to a
score of sighs, utters, xed stares, and throbbing music characteristic
of the later, operatic Visconti, for the trip to the plantationlush, mist-
shrouded tropical rain forestSols has adopted the look of Kurosawa,
while the stark landscape of battle he nds reminiscent of Hass Saragossa
Manuscript: In fact, this entire section of Luca is strongly avored with
a feverish romanticism characteristic of the Polish school in some of its
wilder moments. This is not such an unlikely comparison: the Cuban
critic Puri Faget refers to the inuence of the Polish director Jerzy
Kawalerowiczs Mother Joan of the Angels, a lm that seems to have
made a deep impression in Cuba.16 One thing is certain. Luca is just the
kind of lm that inspires critics to the heights of speculation about its
 280 Four Films

sources and inuences. The names of Buuel, Godard, Antonioni, Resnais,

and Bergman have all been mentioned. For Daz Torres, the battle recalls
the extraordinary battle sequence in Orson Welless Chimes at Midnight.
Sols himself outdoes his critics by bringing in Pasolini as well. He also
mentions the Brazilian Cinema Novo directors, and Faget believes that
Glauber Rochas concept of the Aesthetics of Violence is more impor-
tant than the Italian or Polish inuences. Cinema Novo, Rocha wrote,
teaches that the aesthetics of violence are revolutionary rather than
primitive. The moment of violence is the moment when the coloniser
becomes aware of the existence of the colonised. Only when he is con-
fronted with violence can the coloniser understand, through horror, the
strength of the culture he exploits.17
As for the role of Fernandina, there is a crucial moment halfway
through the tale, when Luca decides to ride o with Rafael, when their
paths cross. She steps out onto the street and immediately Fernandina
throws herself on her, pleading with her not to go. They meet again at
the end, after Luca has executed her lover, Fernandina following her as
she is led away. Luca is a daughter of the upper classes with ne Castil-
ian features; Fernandina a mestiza with dark skin and the hooked nose
of her ancestors. Luca we rst meet surrounded by her friends in a
tranquil environment, and situated within a stationary framing; Fer-
nandina we encounter crazed and alone in the streets, pictured with a
jerking, shifting handheld camera. This scheme of binary oppositions is
every bit as poetic and resonant as it would be in a Shakespeare play.
The coming together of these two women at the end, Kovacs observes,
produces not only a moment of human recognition and solidarity, but
a conuence of mythical forces as well.
These mythical forces nd their most luminous symbolic expression
in the battle scene, which for Kovacs is one of the most striking ever to
appear on the screen. Naked black men ride out on horses to meet the
Spanish cavalry: they are man and horse combined, human esh joined
to animal, modern centaurs bringing horror to the uniformed Spanish.
The image is not invented by Sols. A troop like this rode in the Wars of
Independence at night, naked because it made their black bodies al-
most invisible. With the cry they let out as they rode into battle, they
had a terrifying eect on the enemy.18 That image, says Kovacs, seems
so modern, yet its modernity is merely an armation of its mythic,
timeless verity. At rst, he says,
 Four Films 281

we are aware only of the massive, choreographed battle scenes in the

manner of Hollywood and Soviet spectaculars. Soon the men are on the
ground and we recognize the hand-to-hand combat implanted in our
memories by countless st-ghts in Western saloons. Then suddenly a
new sensation overtakes us as we experience the physical agitation of the
hand-held camera running after the soldiers. The unwritten but strictly
observed rule requiring a relatively stable image on the screen is ung to
the past as our eyes ricochet o one body, then another, our balance
upset, our senses jerked to attention. Yes, the hand-held camera has been
used before by New Wave directors, but they sought to create a casual,
personalat the most extremedisjointed style. Sols, on the other
hand, infuses the image with a kinetic tension unknown to his Parisian
predecessors, almost as if the storm of the battle engulfed the camera in
one of its powerful waves. Even in its agitated state the camera responds
to his command to focus in close-up, if only momentarily, upon distorted
faces, distended limbs. [This is where Chimes at Midnight is evoked.] He
used the hand-held camera and extreme close-up before, when he wanted
to depict the rape of Fernandina and her harassment on the streets, and
he uses them again in the nal scene of Lucas revenge and emotional
collapse.

This technique of handheld close-ups keeps recurring, Kovacs specu-

lates, because it faithfully expresses both individual anguish and mass
violence, two succeeding stages in the struggle against oppression.
The cameraman who accomplished this, one of the most creative cin-
ematographers not only in Cuba but throughout Latin America, was
Jorge Herrera. From now on, the increasingly uid use of the handheld
camera will recur in a number of Cuban lms, reaching its apogee in
the work of its most sensitive and creative practitioner, Mario Garca
Joya (Mayito), in the lms of Toms Gutirrez Alea in the 1970s. In-
deed, Mayito built his own blimpsthe soundproof casing that masks
the noise of the camera motor from the microphonespecially designed
to make it easier to carry the weight of a fully loaded 35 mm movie
camera. The aesthetic eects of the technique will vary, of course, and
the associations and connotations of the style will not remain xed.
What Sols and Herrera achieve in Luca is not to provide the language
of Cuban cinema with new terms of vocabulary, but the elaboration, in
inging the rule of the relatively stable image away, of a startling new
tone of voice, an uncompromising new accent. Manuel Octavio Gmez
and Herrera in La primera carga al machete and Alea and Mayito in Una
pelea cubana contra los demonios (A Cuban battle against the demons,
 282 Four Films

1971) will adapt this new accent to their own expressive needs. Both of
them also exceptional lms, a number of critics have found them phys-
ically straining to watch. Indeed, they strain at the very fabric of vision,
pressing against the limits of visual comprehension as they wrench at
traditional patterns of perception in giving birth to the new.
After the heightened bravura of Luca 1895, Luca 1933 is more
controlled and gentler on the eyes. It is also the most personal of the
three stories. In Luca 1933, Sols explained in the Jump Cut interview,
Im reecting a family experience, particularly the story of my father
a man who participated in the insurrection against the dictatorship of
Gerardo Machado. He didnt die a violent death then, as the character
Aldo does, but he died as a vital human beinga sort of death by
frustration. When I was born, I was surrounded by all those ghosts, by a
failed revolution, by a man whose course in life was interrupted by this
collective failure.
That segment of the lm grows in part out of the need to express this
experience which, though not directly mine, touched me deeply. The fact
that I joined the revolutionary insurrection against Batista when I was
very young, given my lack of ideological orientation at the time and the
spontaneous nature of my actions, must have had a lot to do with my
desire to resume my fathers interrupted trajectory.
Where Luca 1895 is Europeanized, Luca 1933 is already closer to
North American culture, and belongs to the commercial middle class.
The establishing shot, however, which opens the episode (like the colo-
nial town square previously) is this time of a factory interior, the cam-
era looking down toward its women workers with Luca among them,
and the story is then told in ashback. The ashback begins with Luca
and her imposing mother arriving by ferry at one of the oshore keys
for a vacation in their summer house away from the city. (We later nd
out that they have been sent there early in the season by Lucas father to
allow him more time with his mistress in Havana.) Luca observes the
clandestine arrival, after a gun battle in the streets of Havana, of the
wounded Aldo, and she becomes involved with him. Kovacs observes
that the contrast between the spacious summer house and Aldos single
room succinctly spells out the contrast of lifestyles that Luca now
begins to cross. Her mother posing in front of an ornate mirror is con-
trasted with Luca in long shot sitting up in bed in Aldos bare room.
Their love is very gentle. Aldo confesses, You are my rst love; Im not
sorry to say, youre my rst woman. Obviously, he is her rst love too.
 Four Films 283

The mirror shot of her mother is particularly signicant. There have

already been mirror shots in Luca 1895, especially a shot of Luca
preparing herself to meet Rafael, with the camera watching the mirror
image over her shoulder so that the social stereotype of her mirrored
self is at the center of attention. The image of the mother in 1933, how-
ever, is shown from a camera position that is quite clearly her daugh-
ters point of view. According to the detailed visual analysis in a second
essay on the lm by John Mraz, this shot captures the neocolonial de-
formities of Cuban culture [that] are expressed in her imitation of Jean
Harlow.19 Then, after seeing her mother serve as a model of colonized
femininity, Luca enters the room and is forced by her mother to sit in
front of the mirror in order to be molded into the same alienated pat-
terns. The dierent relationship mother and daughter each has to her
mirror image is given expression in the dierent composition of the two
shots, in particular the way the segmented reection of the daughter
cuts across the lm frame. It is clearly to escape from this alienation that
Luca joins Aldo; the equality of their relationship is based on this knowl-
edge she already has of the nature of the world she comes from. With
him, she is able to learn about the world she has been guarded from.
Back in Havana, Luca goes to work. And while the menfolk carry out
an ambush on a bunch of policemen enjoying a rehearsal for a girlie
show, Luca is organizing the women in the factory. Parallel editing
between the two compares and contrasts the two modes of exploitation
of women in the pseudorepublic, the rampantly sexied as opposed to
the articially demure, as Luca also discovers that mirrors can be put to
new purposes: for scrawling political slogans on them with lipstick.
There are demonstrations on the streets in which the women partic-
ipate, which are violently suppressed. Still, Machado falls. The Revolution,
however, is abortive and produces no fundamental change. What tran-
spires is well described by Mraz in his earlier article: The disillusionment
of Luca and Aldo with the new situation contrasts sharply with the op-
portunism shown by their counterparts and former co-revolutionaries,
Antonio and Flora. While the latter move quickly to ensure themselves
an advantageous position in the regime, Aldo and Luca remain true to
the ideas that guided them in the struggle against Machado. Sickened by
the decadence and debauchery which characterize the new political
arrangements . . . Aldo returns to terrorist activity. He is killed and Luca
is left alone, as indeed the superciality of the relationship with Flora,
 284 Four Films

Luca II, 1933, from Luca

her only friend, had shown her to be almost throughout.It almost goes
without saying that there is also a mirror shot of Flora and Luca to-
gether: it shows Lucas face and Floras back and Floras mirror image
between them.
For Peter Biskind, Aldo, with his troubled students face, his straw
hat and tommy gun, is a militant Michael Corleone, a tupamaro of the
thirties. And it is true, Aldo is given a highly romantic image, the most
idealized in the whole lm; the odd mixture of Biskinds references shows
that this is one of the lms weakest elements. He operates, Biskind con-
tinues, in a seemingly isolated guerrilla band without apparent contact
with the other such groups we assume must exist; and thus, with the
virtues and limitations of the bourgeois urban revolutionary, he gets
gunned down amid what another commentator calls the general polit-
ical chaos of the street ghting of the time.
Like the rst Luca, the second Luca goes through dramatic changes
brought about by personal and historical circumstances. But her libera-
tion as a woman is inevitably constrained. Biskind again: It is Aldo
who talks, ghts and dies; it is Luca who sticks loyally to him (Ill fol-
low you; Im your wife, Aldo), carries his baby, and endures, alone, after
 Four Films 285

his death. Anna Marie Taylor notices that several cuts to the gure of
Luca, pregnant and alone in their room in Havana during Aldos long
absences, dramatize the marginality of women to the events of this
period. Even her political involvement at the factory can be seen as
merely an adjunct to Aldos activities. Nevertheless, she concludes, the
moments of solidarity among the women of the factory show more
promise for the future than do Aldos individualistic and ultimately
nihilistic acts. There is a lot to be said for this reading of the episode,
though it ends nonetheless in a mood of desolation.
There are various symbolic moments in this episode too, especially in
the music. In the rst episode, the composer Leo Brouwer uses a theme
from Schumann to create a musical icon of the period. In the second,
the dominant mood is conveyed by the use of themes from Chopin and
Dvork, and he also uses Poor Buttery to depict the American pene-
tration of Cuba in the scene of a debauched victory party. This is like
the way lvarez uses music. Overall, the style of the episode remains
quiet and muted. Biskind likens it to Truauts Jules et Jim and Franjus
Thrse in its employment of slow, deliberate pans, tracks, and zooms.
On the other hand, another writer, Michael Myerson, nds in its muted
tones a pastiche suggestive of Hollywood of the period portrayed, and
Mraz agrees with this, speaking (in his earlier article) of long, slow, soft
shots in which foreground focus and lighting are used to convey a por-
trait image closely resembling that of Hollywood productions during
the golden age.20
The Peruvian critic Isaac Len Frias nds Luca 1933 close to Holly-
wood models of the 1930s such as Cukor or Kazan. Among the Cuban
critics, Elena Daz likes the sobriety of the episode, which she thinks the
most mature of the three. The ending, however, she nds stereotyped.
Evidently, the inadequacies in the portrayal of Aldos character become
too much for her. But it is a minor deciency, she believes, commend-
ing the accuracy of observation of the women in the tobacco factory,
the demeanor of women in a certain way imitating men, which was
characteristic, she says, of (Cuban) feminism in the 1930s.
In the nal episode, Sols emerges, as Kovacs felicitously puts it, from
the haunted past, and steps into the sunshine of the present. He also
moves out of the close and seething city of 1933 to the brilliant light of
the Cuban countryside, for Luca 196 is set in a new agricultural co-
operative. It opens with an early-morning shot of two peasant women
 286 Four Films

chatting on a roadside as a noisy truckload of their fellow workers comes

to pick them up. We nd ourselves immediately in a highly particular-
ized scene as the truck stops outside a row of small houses. The driver
honks the horn and says Lets see how long it takes her today. Since shes
got a boyfriend we have to wake her up in the morning! The boisterous
characteristics of a fast-paced farcical comedy are thus immediately es-
tablished, and never let up. There is an enormous sense of exhilaration
in this last episode, exuberance and optimism. This is also carried by the
music, which employs the traditional Guantanamera (its roots, accord-
ing to Alejo Carpentier, are the Spanish sixteenth century), to which
Brouwer gives a brilliant and jazzy orchestration not unlike the Leonard
Bernstein of West Side Storythough the Mexican composers Chvez
and Revueltas are present in this music tooand to which Joseito Fer-
nndez, on the sound track, sings humorous and moralistic verses the
way he did on the radio in the 1930s.
Adela Legr (of Manuela) as Luca 196 emerges to join the women
on the truck, and they all talk animatedly about changing social mores as
she tells the compaeras that her new boyfriend, Toms (Adolfo Llaurado
from Manuela), doesnt want to let her work after their marriage. We meet
him waiting for Luca after work as the rst of the Guantanamera
verses is heard:

My divine country girl, girl from Guantnamo,

The country is a source of innumerable riches . . .
Men and women alike must gather its bounty.

The sequence stands in for their wedding, which we hear about in the
next scene from two old peasant women. He spends the whole day on
top of her, says one, he doesnt even let her up for air. This is what the
other calls the steamroller treatment. Toms is shown through their
joking as oversexedand from a womans, not a mans, point of view.
Then the lm moves from the public world in which it began into the
private interior space of the married couple, where we now see them
playfully running around the house, Luca hiding, Toms seeking, till
they end up on the bed, Luca shrieking (as the published script describes
it) both delighted and terried. The entire scene inevitably recalls Luca
1895 with Rafael in the abandoned outhouse of the sugar mill.
The couple are then summoned to a birthday party at the commu-
nity center. The scene is crowded and eventful, in the greatest contrast
 Four Films 287

to the party in Luca 1933. Luca discusses with an older woman from
the truck, Angelina, Tomss refusal to let her go to work. Luca seeks
sisterly advice from her: He says that the Revo . . . that hes the Revolution!
I love him a lot, Angelina, what am I going to do? We catch a glimpse
of a group of foreignersevidently Russians or East Europeanswhose
appearance is so distinctive that they create quite a stir among the cam-
pesinos. Some critics have made rather too much of this, supposing it
to be a deliberate jibe. But although the campesinos are bemused, and,
when one of the women attempts to dance like a Cuban, amused as
well, it is not certain that the symbolic signicance of their presence, as
Mraz thought in the rst of his articles, is to compare Soviet imperial-
ism with the North American variety, as if they were equivalents, but
something much less devious, simply an ironic comment on cultural
distance.
Their appearance is, in any case, brief. A moment later, Toms, con-
sumed by clearly irrational jealousy, picks a ght with someone who is
dancing with Luca while he talks with Flavio, Angelinas husband. Im-
mediately we are back with the couple in their small house, Toms, pos-
sessed, nailing the windows shut to turn the house into a prison, shout-
ing at Luca: What did you expect? That you could go around dancing
to crazy music with every pair of balls that comes along? I want you to
obey me, you hear? Thats what youre my wife for! For the second time
comes the Guantanamera commentary: The scourge of jealousy . . .
causes a ton of grief . . . such behavior in our new life / Today is out of
place. The interpolation of the song is more Brechtian than Shake-
spearean, but the unfolding of the story is very much like Shakespearean
comedyone that deals with the public and private lives of a warring
couple.
The community breaches Tomss defenses by means of the literacy
campaign. Toms is, of course, intensely suspicious of the young teacher
ascribed to Luca, but in the end Lucas education must take its course.
To cut a long and subtly narrated story short, Luca nally escapes from
the house, leaving Toms a note that reads Im going. Im not a slave.
She moves in with Angelina. When Toms comes searching her out on
the salt ats where she is working, her compaeras energetically restrain
him. He has been weakened, morally destroyed, as Joseito Fernndez
sings, a laughingstock . . . a product of that jealousy which comes of
poor imagination. As the lm closes, Toms and Luca are still ghting,
 288 Four Films

Luca III, 196, from Luca

but the nal image is that of a little girl who laughs at them and then
goes o, as if turning away toward the future.
The camera work in Luca 196 is mostly in a rough and uid, hand-
held, eye-level mid-shot with a good proportion of close-ups, which, as
Anna Marie Taylor has noticed, brings the viewer into intimate contact
with the people of this small country community. Mraz, in his second
article, observes that there is also a recall of the mirror shots of the pre-
vious episodes, in which Luca is seen making up, but this time inch-
ing from the mirror image for its reection of behavior so obviously in-
appropriate. The shot in question comes just as Joseito Fernndez is
singing But such behavior in our new life / Today is out of place. It
combines with the sung commentary to create a perfect instance of
Brechtian cinemaan eect of distantiation combined with the gesture
of an actor stepping out of one role and into another. This is contrasted
with Toms at the mirror tooproudly preening himself. It makes a
powerful critique of machismo.

In Memorias del subdesarrollo the Cuban intelligentsia, the artistic and

intellectual community Fidel spoke to in the Words to the Intellectuals,
confronts itself. It discovers itself in the act of breaking down the vocab-
ulary of its own existence. Toms Gutirrez Aleas lm, based on a novel by
 Four Films 289

Edmundo Desnoes, is an exercise in the fragmentation and dissociation

of imagery and representation, as the prerevolutionary world is dis-
membered while the cultural shapes of the new have not yet emerged.
Of all Cuban lms of the 1960s it is in certain ways the closest to the
ethos of the metropolitan intellectual, a lm that portrays the subjective
condition of its central character, a kind of intellectual antihero in a
state of paralyzed perceptiveness. But although metropolitan critics have
compared this lm to Antonioni, and its lead actor Sergio Corrieri to
the young Mastroianni, seeing the lm as a portrayal of middle-class angst
in the midst of a vapid society, there is none of Antonionis nihilism
here and, as Michael Myerson has said, revolutionary Cuba is not cap-
italist Italy, and the milieu in which Corrieris Sergio operates (or rather,
cannot operate) is far dierent from that pictured by Antonioni.21
Sergio is neither a revolutionary nor a counterrevolutionary. He would
like to be a writer, which he perceives as a vocation outside the realms of
the political imperative. Before the Revolution he owned a furniture
store, which his father gave him to set him up in business. Now he lives
o the payments made to him by the state as an allowance for the con-
scation of his property as a landlord, for he also owned a block of ats
in the well-appointed Havana district of Vedado, one of the citys tallest
buildings, at the top of which he now lives alone. His wife, from whom
he is divorced, left with his parents for the United States during 1961 in
the mass exodus of the bourgeoisie. This is the point in Sergios tale of
woe at which the lm opens.
Except for the title sequence, that is. The titles are superimposed over
a nighttime carnival scene lmed from within the midst of a dancing,
jostling crowd by a handheld camera. A disturbance takes place, we catch
a glimpse of a body lying amid the feet on the ground in a pool of blood,
then lifted up and carried away through the throng. The last credit ap-
pears and the picture cuts to the airport, where we discover Sergio, in a
dierent crowd, with his wife and parents, making their farewells. As the
images of the title sequence recede into the antechamber of our attention,
they leave behind the feel of enigma, an unresolved tension that pervades
everything that proceeds to unfold (until eventually, much later in the
lm, the scene is repeated, only from a dierent point of view), while the
cut to the airport establishes a paradigm for the oblique montage and
narrative style of the lm, which sets up many an enigma as it unfolds
through the surprise juxtaposition of some new scene of contrasting
 290 Four Films

aspect. One of the modes the lm adopts for its fragmentation of im-
agery and representation, this is, of course, a characteristic form of ex-
pression of the modernist aesthetic.
The look in Sergios eyes as he separates himself from the parting
embrace of his family shapes another paradigm that will be constantly
evoked throughout the lm. It is the look of distantiation, which is im-
mediately reinforced here by the not quite invisible wall of plate glass
visible only in the reections cast upon itthat separates the travelers
from their homeland as they go through the partition into the depar-
ture lounge, a wall of silence that the camera places us alternately on
either side of.
On the balcony of his at, after returning from the airport, Sergio
surveys the scene below him through a telescope, obviously a habitual
occupation since the telescope is mounted on the parapet, and at the
same time a metaphorical extension of the distant look in Sergios eyes,
because the telescope fragments, breaking vision up into an innity of
rounded images, each of which is a separate little scene in itself. What
Sergio does not seem able to discover as his story unfolds, but which the
lm itself exemplies as it does so, is the synthesis of perception through
creative montage. This is not so much an interpretation of the lm as a
statement of its method. In a set of working notes on the lm, the direc-
tor explains: Sergio is a person unable to enter into the new reality that
the Revolution forces upon him, which is so much vaster than his pre-
vious world. Why, then, did he not leave too? Because for him everything
has come either too early or too late and he is incapable of making deci-
sions. Yet through this personage who in almost all respects we are
inclined to reject, we can discover new aspects of the reality that sur-
rounds us. Sometimes through him, sometimes by contrast. His attitude
as a spectator with a minimum of lucidity keeps the critical spirit awake
in us . . . the confrontation of his own world with the documentary
world that we show (the world of our subjectivity, not his) becomes
rich in suggestion.22
They accordingly set out, says Alea, with the basic intention of mak-
ing a kind of documentary about a man who ended up alone, and the
idea that the vision of reality oered by documentary inserts would
strike against the subjective vision of the protagonist. Direct documen-
tary lming, bits of newsreel, photographs, recordings of speeches, lm-
ing in the streets with a hidden camerathese were the resources that
 Four Films 291

would be brought to bear. Some things in the novel would be dropped,

new sequences introduced, Sergios voice-over would speak its testimony,
but the lms open and seemingly disarticulated language would give
the eect of a plastic montage more than a literary narration. The mul-
tiplicity of means would make the idiom of the lm not only more open
but also richer in its signiers. Ultimately, the intention was not to re-
ect reality but to detect a problem, not to soften reality but to bring it
alive, even aggressively, even, so to speak, to disturb the peace. Not, one
should add, that things in Cuba were exactly peaceful at that moment:
there was great revolutionary energy and ideological struggle going on.
But there were always people, says Alea, who thought certain things would
look after themselves, and these were the same people who tended to
believe themselves depositaries of the revolutionary bequest, who spoke
of the people as a promising child and tried to tell others how this child
should be spoken to. These people the lm, among other things, pro-
posed to aggravate and provoke.
Surveying what he can see of Havana from his balcony, Sergios voice
is heard over the images speaking to himself: Everything remains the
same, he says, seeing lovers by the swimming pool of an adjacent hotel;
Cuba free and independent, over scenes of defense preparations, who
would have thought that this can happen? And over a shot of the plinth
from which the imperial eagle of the United States has been removed
(one of the established icons of Cuban cinemathe scene of the demon-
stration in which it was pulled down crops up in several icaic docu-
mentaries) he wonders, Where is the dove that Picasso was going to
send? adding that its very comfortable being a communist millionaire
in Paris. Loaded with the ambiguity of innuendo, these are signicant
words, which spell out several things about the person who speaks them:
the European axis of his thinking, his sense of frustration, his feelings of
passive belligerence toward the world, his resentment. No, he is not an
attractive character.
Especially as he goes on to enact his own unattractiveness to himself
in a grotesque orgy of self-abuse. He rummages through the belongings
his wife Laura has been forced to leave behind, trying on her furs and
manhandling, so to speak, the icons of her femininitya powder pu,
pearls, lipstick. Twisting the lipstick up and down obviously seems a
classic Freudian symbol, and Alea is not the kind of director to overlook
this. On the contrary, he means to advise us of Sergios phallocentricity,
 292 Four Films

Memorias del subdesarrollo (Toms Gutirrez Alea, 1968)

which the lm will develop. And for once, because of corresponding

symbols in the lm concerning visionlike the telescopethe lm it-
self licenses the nding of the relationship that psychoanalytic lm
theory posits between phallocentrism and the camera.
Sergio then sits down with the lipstick in front of a mirror and pro-
ceeds to doodle with it. If the image reminds us of Luca 1933, it should
also be observed how dierently the same idea is used here. Sergio scrib-
bles on the mirror not so much to interfere with its hated reection, but
rather more narcissistically, like an artist putting the nishing touches
to a self-portrait. Finally, he takes one of Lauras stockings and pulls it
over his head, distorting his features, as he listens to a tape recording he
made of a conversation in which he and Laura are arguing, rst about a
movie they have seen, then, as he taunts her, about herself and what he
calls her struggle between elegance and vulgarity, her use, to disguise
her vulgar origins, of all the commodities women are oered to construct
their image with. You get more attractive each day, Sergio mocks her,
youre more articial, I dont like natural beauty. At the climax of the
row, he tells her he has recorded the whole thing on tape, everything,
word for word, itll be fun later on, when you hear it.
 Four Films 293

The nature of Sergios attitude toward women is developed out on

the streets of Havana where he scrutinizes them. He enters a bookshop,
where the shelves are stocked with the classic works of Marxism, cheap
editions of novels, and clearly situated behind his shoulder, drawing
our attention away from his observing eye, a book called The Hero of
Our Times. Voice-over, he is saying, Here women look into your eyes as
if they want to be touched by your look. That only happens here. Out
on the streets again, Sergio passes a bust of MartAlea has not forgot-
ten, as a good modernist artist, to allude to himselfwith an inscrip-
tion, Nuestro vino es agrio, pero es nuestro vino (Our wine is sour, but
its our wine). But Sergio evidently does not share the feeling of combat-
ivity that surrounds him.
A title appears, the single word Pablo, and the lm changes pace as
we cut to Sergio driving with a friend along the Malecn, Havanas
seafront drive. Over a ashback to the two men with their wives at a
nightclub, Pablo spills out his cynicismI never got involved with
politics, I have a clear consciencebut Sergio is completely uninterested.
More than uninterested. Something in him is incensed by his erstwhile
friends insensitivity, and, as he stares ahead of him (the absent look in
his eyes weve seen before), the picture cuts to a montage of stills of
scenes of poverty in Latin America, as he muses: He says the only thing
a Cuban cant stand is hunger. All the starvation weve gone through
since the Spanish came! In Latin America four children die every minute
due to illnesses caused by malnutrition. The statistic comes from the
Second Declaration of Havana. A moment later, up in Pablos apart-
ment, the conversation turns to the subject of the prisoners captured at
the Bay of Pigs, a topic Sergio introduces to taunt Pablo. In a most
extraordinary and spectacular event, forty of these prisoners were inter-
rogated by a panel of journalists before a packed audience in a Havana
theater just a few days after their defeat. The whole event, which lasted
four days, was televised, published verbatim in the press, and later in
book form. The sequence begins with a newsreel of the invasion and
the captured mercenaries being marched along hands on head. A title
appears: The Truth of the Group is in the Murderer. Sergio, reading
from the book, narrates: We found beneath the military organization
of the invaders an order in their social duties that summarizes the divi-
sion of the moral and social functions of the bourgeoisie: priest, busi-
nessman, ocial, philosopher, politician, torturer, and the innumerable
 294 Four Films

sons of good families. Aleas procedure here in putting Sergios voice-

over to work like a newsreel commentator is a bold one, which allows
the lm to elaborate the sense of social anatomy through which Sergio
himself is refracted. One of the prisoners on trial declares, like Pablo,
that he is not a political person. A moment later, Sergios voice-over
appears to be holding a dialogue with another. We surmise that Sergio
understands perfectly well what these claims about being nonpolitical
amount to. At the end of the sequence, he comments that in none of
the cases considered was there a recovery of the true dialectical relation-
ship between individual and group; we are left reecting not only that
this is true of his own situation, but that he knows it.
Another title, Noem, introduces us to the girl who cleans his apart-
ment (played by Eslinda Nez of Luca 1933), about whom he fanta-
sizes vividly. Then another title, Elena comes up and we are on La Rampa,
Havanas nightlife strip of yore. Elena (played by Daysi Granados) is a
pretty Havana girl whom he spies and picks up. His opening words,
You have beautiful knees, do you want to have dinner with me? are
spoken with the self-assurance of a man of social advantage who knows
that women nd him attractive, especially since he is taller and his fea-
tures are more European than those of most Cuban men. His whole
demeanor hides his internal angst.
The lm enters a new phase, for each new name title also brings a
new theme. Elena is waiting, she tells Sergio, for someone from icaic
about a possible job, but he hasnt turned up. Sergio tells her, as they eat
dinner, that he has a friend who is a director there, and then asks her
why she wants to be an actress. Because, she says, Im tired of always
being the same. That way I can be someone else without people think-
ing Im crazy. I want, she adds, speaking the words like a line shes learned,
to unfold my personality. She thus enters the lm and Sergios life like
his shadow, his double, another lens through which his own identity
crisis is refracted, which he himself undoubtedly recognizes since he is
too intelligent not to see it, and which he decides to humor: But all
those characters are like scratched records. No one by this stage in the
lm will be wholly surprised when this scene cuts to a montage of clips
of scenes from movies. But Alea still has plenty of surprises up his sleeve
and the clips arrest us by repeating themselvesimages of couples in
the clasp of lovemaking, of a woman stepping into a shower, of a strip-
per. Abruptly the images stop and lights go up and we are in a viewing
 Four Films 295

theater. Sergio, sitting next to Elena, turns to someone behind them and
asks, Where did you get them? This is evidently his friend the director.
In fact, it is Alea, though as a character in his own lm he remains un-
named. They showed up one day, he replies, theyre the cuts Batistas
censors made, they said they were oensive to morals and good breed-
ing. What are you going to do with them? asks Sergio. The director
explains that hes going to put them into a lm. Itll be a collage with a
little bit of everything. Obviously, it is the lm we are watching. Will
they release it? asks Sergio. The scene is a kind of conceit, but it is much
more than a clever way of suggesting, as a number of metropolitan crit-
ics thought, that the new regime was not as mindless as its predecessors.
Actually, the scene is a step in the translation of the novel to the
screen. The adaptation of the novel involves certain problems, because
the whole thing is a conceit: it is written in the rst person by a character
with the ambition to be a writer who has the same name as the author,
of the novel. This is a kind of play upon the identity of the author, which
is another typical trait of modernism. In the work of a Borges, for ex-
ample, such conceits are used to set up metaphysical conundrums about
the human condition. Here the purpose is to capture, in the spiders
web of language, certain elusive aspects of the identity crisis of the artist
within the revolutionary process, the problem of the desgarramiento,
the ideological rupture with the past. But how can you translate the
novels rst person to the screen? There is no direct or logical equivalent
in lm of the persona of the rst-person narrator in literature except a
voice on the sound track, which is not the same. As an analogue of the
writers pen the camera is impersonal; it cannot say I, it always says
there is, here is. This is why the lmmakers chose to oppose the
camera to the pen as instruments through which to record the world,
by contrasting Sergios subjectivity with the documentary quality of the
camera image. In fact, the lm invites us alternately to identify the cam-
era with Sergio and to separate them, and it does this in odd and irreg-
ular ways, like making his voice the commentary to a piece of newsreel.
Sergio takes Elena back to his apartment. She is awkward and embar-
rassed. Sergio tries to win her over by giving her some of his wifes dis-
carded clothing to try on. A classic game of seduction takes place, lmed
with a nervous handheld camera, as she alternately lures him on and re-
pulses him until he forcefully pins her down on the bed and she gives in
to him. Afterwards she cries, protests that he has ruined her, and leaves.
 296 Four Films

With Sergio alone again, the camera pans around the room until it lands
on Sergio together with Laura, in the middle of the argument on the
tape recording we heard earlier.
Pablo is leaving. Sergio goes to see him o at the airport. His depar-
ture occasions in Sergio another bout of self-reection, in which a cer-
tain self-honesty is mixed up with his self-delusion. Although it may
destroy me, he says, this Revolution is my revenge against the stupid
Cuban bourgeoisie. Against idiots like Pablo . . . everything I dont want
to be. The trouble is not only that he has forgotten how his wife left
Cuba to escape him as much as the Revolution, but that he has also
conated the personal and the political without properly understanding
either. His only solution is to try and hold himself apart, even though
he knows what it costs him to do so: I keep my mind clear. Its a dis-
agreeable clarity, empty. I know whats happening to me but I cant
avoid it. In a ashback to his childhood, he associates his present self-
paralysis with the subjugation of the schoolboy to the power of the
priests at his Catholic school, which taught him the relationship, he
says, between justice and power. But the ashback is paired with an-
other, his induction into the mysteries of sex in a whorehouse, and as
the image cuts back to the present, with Sergio reecting upon Elena
and his discovery that she wasnt as complex and interesting as he rst
thought, it is not so certain that he really understood the relationship
between justice and power after all, at least insofar as it concerns the
power men wield over women. That he has power over Elena he is per-
fectly aware, but he conceives of himself wielding it benevolently as he
decides to educate her. As they visit an art gallery, his voice-over ex-
plains, I always try to live like a European, and Elena forces me to feel
underdeveloped at every step.
The sequence that follows is not in the original version of the novel,
only in the rewrite Desnoes produced after collaborating on the lm.
Julianne Burton records that in the view of Desnoes, Alea betrayed
the novel, but in a creative and illuminating way, objectivizing a world
that was still abstract in the book and giving it social density; the inter-
polation of this new sequence goes even further, expanding the com-
mentary on the social role of the artist. It is also another step in trans-
posing the novel to the screen. Following a title, A Tropical Adventure,
we nd ourselves in Ernest Hemingways house near Havana, which is
now the Hemingway Museum. Sergio has taken Elena there in the
 Four Films 297

interests of her education. She is predictably unimpressed (Is this where

Mr. Way used to live? I dont see anything so special. Books and dead
animals.) and she quickly becomes bored, wandering o and posing
for photographs for some foreign tourists. Sergio hides from her and
watches as she gives up searching and hitches a ride back to town. There
is much more to the sequence, however, which is a long one, than Sergio
ditching Elena. It amounts to a disquisition on the social and historical
relations of the writer and is in many ways the pivot of the entire lm,
the conuence of Sergios most objective reections on the topic and the
analysis of the lmmakers, in which, by uniting the two, the lmmakers
at once pay not uncritical homage to the tradition of the writer as the
embodiment of social conscience and reect upon the revolutionary
transformation that this conscience must now undergo. The sequence
begins with the commentary of the museum guide, about whom we learn
from Sergios voice-over: Hemingway found him when he was a little
boy playing in the streets. . . . He molded him to his needs. The faithful
servant and the great lord. The colonialist and Gunga Din. Hemingway
must have been unbearable. The guide, however, describes him as a
good man, a humane man, a war correspondent in the Spanish civil
war who joined the International Brigade, by implication a friend of the
Revolution even though not a revolutionary himself. It is clear, never-
theless, that he was not only a good writer, he was a rich one too. As
Sergio explains: This was his refuge, his tower, his island in the trop-
ics. . . . Boots for hunting in Africa, American furniture, Spanish photo-
graphs, magazines and books in English, a bullght poster. Cuba never
really interested him. Here he could nd refuge, entertain his friends,
write in English, and sh in the Gulf Stream. But if we conclude that he
came here to solve his problems, we are not slow to think of his last
problem, whose solution he found elsewhere, at his Idaho ranch. (It was
after his suicide that his wife gave his Cuban house to the Revolution.)
From Sergios commentary on the commentary of the guide, two things
emerge. One is the question of ocial museum versions of culture;
this belongs to the critique the lm directs toward the paternalists within
the Revolution. But second, from the position of the sequence within the
unfolding argument of the lm, it becomes symbolic of the inevitable
death, indeed, the necessary spiritual suicide, of the old kind of writer in
the face of the new society. And yet, although Sergio realizes this perfectly
well, he is unable to tear himself away from the relics in the museum in
 298 Four Films

the same way that he cannot kick over the traces within himself of the
anachronistic social model that Hemingway represents.
The problem is not only Sergios. Another screen title announces:
Round TableLiterature and Underdevelopment. Like the guide at
the Hemingway Museum, the participants are real people: the Haitian
poet Ren Depestre, the Italian novelist Gianni Toti, the Argentinian
novelist David Vias, and, signicantly, the author of Memorias del sub-
desarrollo the novelEdmundo Desnoes. The panel discusses the topic
while Sergio, in the audience, tries to follow the argument, but like every-
one else becomes restless. When the discussion is thrown open, some-
one requests permission to speak in English. He is the North American
playwright Jack Gelber, translator of the English edition of Desnoess
novel. Why is it, he asks, that if the Cuban Revolution is a total revo-
lution, they have to resort to an archaic form of discussion such as a
roundtable and treat us to an impotent discussion of issues that Im
well informed about and most of the public here is well informed about,
when there could be another more revolutionary way to reach an audi-
ence like this? The picture cuts away to a long shot of Sergio walking
the streets again. The camera zooms in very slowly toward him, into
bigger and bigger close-up, until nally the image loses focus and he
disappears into a blur, while his voice-over reects: I dont understand.
The American was right. Words devour words and they leave you in the
clouds. . . . How does one get rid of underdevelopment? It marks every-
thing. What are you doing there, Sergio? You have nothing to do with
them. Youre alone. . . . Youre nothing, youre dead. Now it begins, Sergio,
your nal destruction.
Another title, Hanna, another ashback, girls emerging from a
school. Hanna was a Jewish refugee from Hitler; they were going to get
married but her parents took her o to New York; she had all the poise
he nds lacking in his other women, especially Elena, who, back in the
present, is waiting for him outside his at. He avoids her, but then it
turns out shes told her family he has ruined her. They demand that he
marry her and when he refuses they decide to press charges against him
for rape. Is this, then, to be his nal undoing? He fully expects so, and as
the courtroom scene unfolds, so do we. But the court nds the charges
against him unproven. He is left to wonder: It was a happy ending, as
they say. For once justice triumphed. But was it really like that? There is
 Four Films 299

something that leaves me in a bad position. Ive seen too much to be

innocent. They have too much darkness inside their heads to be guilty.
The closing section of the lm shows Sergios ultimate self-paralysis
as the city around him engages in defense preparations during the un-
folding of the so-called Cuban missile crisis. If the confrontation be-
tween the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962 over the
placing of Soviet missiles in Cuba was experienced throughout the world
as a moment of reckoning, the place it occupies within collective and
individual memory in Cuba itself is saturated with peculiar signicance.
It was another of the experiences of the Revolutions early years that
played a denitive role in forging social cohesion and bonding the is-
lands unity, like the experiences of the literacy campaign and the Bay of
Pigs invasion. In the popular experience, the way people remember it, it
was a moment in which individual fears were submerged in the collec-
tive, and national consciousness took on a peculiarly tangible form, as
of a people that nds itself condemned to a historical test in the defense
of self-determination. A junior member of icaic, in his early teens at
the time, remembered in a conversation with the present author the
sensation of knowing they were targets for a kind of attack that no one,
if it came, would be able to escape, and that therefore called up a unique
shared resoluteness. The sensation gripped them with special intensity
because while the world was holding its breath because of Cuba, the
Cubans themselves were powerless. As Sergio puts it, in his nal voice-
over, sandwiched between speeches on television by Kennedy and by
Fidel, And if it started right now? Its no use protesting. Ill die like the
rest. This island is a trap. Were very small, and too poor. Its an expen-
sive dignity.
I believe it must have been this last sequence as much as anything
that was responsible for the initial misreading of the lm that occurred
in the metropolis, where a number of critics were so surprised to nd a
Cuban picture handling the theme of bourgeois alienation that they
failed to perceive the critique it leveled not merely at Sergio but by im-
plication at anyone identifying too closely with him. These critics, insen-
sible to the nature of Sergios narcissism but narcissistically sharing his
all-consuming sense of resentment, instead felt attered at seeing such
an accurate portrayal of their own reection. And the epilogue is con-
structed with such understatement that it must have allowed them to
 300 Four Films

identify completely with his own sentiments in the face of the threat of
nuclear annihilation. Since they could hardly, as alienated intellectuals,
conceive of any other sentiment in the face of the missile crisisfor ex-
ample, that national dignity is not negotiableso they imagined that
the lm was meant to be critical of the political process that led up to it.
They assumed that the director of such a lm could only be a fellow
spirit, that he couldnt possibly be an enthusiastic supporter of such a
state as they took Cuba to be. They saw the lms critique of under-
development as a criticism of the stupidity of the common people, as
if individuals and not the social heritage were responsible. Many critics,
to be sure, escape these stricturesVincent Canby, for instance, who
cited Antonioni in order to contrast the Italian and the Cuban.23 But if
there was a Vincent Canby, there was also an Andrew Sarris, who as
president of the U.S. National Society of Film Critics, tried to turn
Alea into a dissident of the type the capitalist media loved to nd in the
Soviet Union.24
That was when the U.S. State Department refused to grant Alea a visa
to attend the societys awards ceremony at which he was due to receive a
special prize for the lm. This was not the rst time a Cuban lmmaker
had been refused a U.S. visa. The same thing happened a short while
earlier in 1972, to a delegation from icaic intending to visit the United
States for a Cuban lm festival planned by an independent distributor,
adf (American Documentary Films), in New York and other cities. Not
only were they refused visas but anti-Castro migr terrorist groups
threatened violence if the festival were allowed to go ahead, and there
were indeed attacks on the Olympia Theater in New York where the
lms were to be shown. But the biggest attack on the festival was that of
the U.S. government, which seized one of the lms from the cinema and
raided the adf oces, thus bringing the festival to a halt. The grounds
the government used for these actions were that the lms had been ille-
gally imported. As Michael Myerson has explained: A meeting between
a Festival spokesman and Stanley Sommereld, Acting Head of Foreign
Assets Control in Washington, was straight out of Catch-22. Sure, said
Sommereld, the government exempts the news media and universities
from the Cuban embargo statutes because news gathering and a body of
scholarship are in the national interest. But no, he continued, in answer
to a question, it would not be in the national interest if the population
as a whole had direct access to the materials instead of having selected
 Four Films 301

elites act as middlemen in deciphering them.25 Protests were made, of

course, on both occasions, and they involved a large number of distin-
guished persons. When the icaic delegation were refused their visas at
the very same moment Nixon was visiting China, Senator William Ful-
bright asked why the U.S. government should consider four Cuban lm-
makers a security threat and not Mao Tse-tung and the Peoples Repub-
lic. When Alea was banned, he declared in Congress: I nd it passing
strange that the Treasury Department would be so terried of the im-
pact of Cuban lms on the American people, while the State Depart-
ment is encouraging such exchanges with the Soviet Union.26 Washington
Post columnist Nicholas von Homan, criticizing the aforementioned
Treasury ocial, pointed to a more insidious anomaly: Go every morn-
ing to your hutch in the Treasury Department, Mr. Sommereld, he
wrote, drink your coee, read your paper, and daily bring a full mea-
sure of aggravation into the lives of people who dont yet know your
name. Keep out the movies. . . . The rest of the Treasury Department
will let the heroin ow in.27
adf was forced by these attacks into bankruptcy, though Memorias
del subdesarrollo was nally able to open commercially in New York in
May 1973, to be selected early in 1974 by the New York Times as one of
the years ten best movies. The same newspaper, when Aleas visa was
refused, again criticized the ridiculous behavior of the ocials and de-
clared it irrational to treat the oer of a prize to a lm as a subversive
act.28 The Cubans took the whole aair stoically. It did not escape their
attention that these responses did not all square up. As Alea made plain
in the statement he sent to be read at the awards ceremony, the Cubans
were not surprised by any of it, for the lm itself, the subject of the
whole to-do, reected the aggressions directed by the U.S. government
against the Cubans from the beginning, including the blockade, the dis-
information, and the gamut of actions intended to impede contact
between the two peoples, which kept the North Americans in a state of
ignorance about Cuba and what was really going on there.29 It was pre-
cisely this kind of ignorance that allowed Andrew Sarris to utter his
misinterpretation of Aleas position. As the Cuban director put it when
Julianne Burton asked him for his comments on Sarris: His lack of
information was such that one suspects a kind of tendentious ignorance,
if such a thing is possible. Its hard to know in such cases where igno-
rance leaves o and stupidity or malice begins.30
 302 Four Films

In Cuba itself, Memorias, because of its sophistication of style, proved

a dicult lm for many of the audience. But Alea recalled later that it
produced the very positive eect of sending many people back to the
cinema to see it a second and even a third time.31 Here was evidence
that icaics policies were really beginning to bite.

From Memorias del subdesarrollo on, the interpenetration of ction and

documentary becomes a distinctive preoccupation in a number of Cuban
lms. In particular, it is next pursued with great originality and virtuos-
ity, a year after Memorias, by Manuel Octavio Gmez in La primera
carga al machete. A shortish lm of eighty-four minutes in black and
white and using a wide screen, La primera carga al machete is another of
the lms on the theme of the hundred years war. It deals with the events
that opened the war against the Spanish in 1868 when independence
ghters under the generalship of the Dominican Mximo Gmez began
the rebellion in the east of the island, where they succeeded in taking
the important city of Bayamo. The Spanish captain general sends two
strong columns of the colonial army to recapture Bayamo and put down
the rebellion. The rebels force one of the columns to retreat by means
not of direct confrontation but of a strategy of deception, while the sec-
ond column is destroyed at the very entrance to Bayamo by the attack
after which the lm is named.
Gmez said that he found the historical movie, the grandiloquent
kind of lm the term is usually identied with, insupportable, and for
this reason a documentary method seemed to him the logical way to
approach the subject. But how exactly to apply this to a historical sub-
ject? From the beginning we set about trying to give the idea that we
were developing the story as if it were being lmed at that very moment,
as if it had been possible at that time to use a camera and recorder to
collect the facts.32 They applied this idea visually by using high-contrast
photography to give the impression of very early lm stock. This is com-
bined with a handheld camera and direct sound (which Alea had used
extensively for the rst time in Cuba in Memorias). At the same time,
the lm employs a number of documentary procedures, especially the
interview carried out in the manner of television reportage, interviewee
on camera speaking to an interviewer oscreen. There is also a discus-
sion among a patriotic group commenting on the events, who begin by
introducing themselves to camera one by one, and a sequence in which
 Four Films 303

an agitator, a kind of accomplice of the camera, accosts people in a pub-

lic square in Havana and obliges them to give their opinions about the
independence issue, until Spanish soldiers appear on the scene to break
up the disturbance that has thus been created. Other interviewees, at the
scene of battle, include Spanish soldiers who have survived the machete
charge and describe the terror of having to face such a deadly weapon;
Spanish functionariesincluding both the islands governor and the
commander of the troops; patriotic inhabitants of Bayamo, victims of
Spanish repression; and rebel soldiers. The documentary techniques
allow considerable uidity in the structuring of the lm. Indeed, the lm
opens after the machete charge, with Spanish soldiers who have sur-
vived it and the patriots discussing its signicance, before going back to
reconstruct the events, by way of a documentary sequence on the ma-
chete itself, its origins and uses, which is thus presented as a character in
the lm in its own right, so to speak. Finally, the lm is punctuated by
the gure of a singer (Pablo Milans), a roving troubador who sings a
ballad that provides a further commentary on the events.
The net result of these techniques is not so much to transport the
viewer into the past as to bring the past into the present. This is the very
opposite of the conventional historical movie, which aims, in its crass-
est examples, through creating an illusion of distant times, to provide a
vehicle of escapism. Such lms misconstrue the past in order to shore
up the present status quo through the back-projection, as it were, of the
supposedly universal and eternal values of the dominant bourgeois ide-
ology. This lm, as the Venezuelan critics put it, changes the habitual
perspective of such historiography, and thereby displays the continuity
of struggle between past and present with incomparable urgency. One
indication of this is the parallel the lmmakers found to emerge while
they were making the lm between the gure of Mximo Gmez and
that of Che Guevara, which they had not originally thought of. At the
same time, this transportation of the past achieves, once again, dis-
tinctly Brechtian results, for, as the Venezuelan critics also observe, the
mummication of the past in the scholarly texts is substituted by a
form of representation that eliminates conventional emotional identi-
cation with the characters in the drama, and stimulates instead a process
of reection that inserts the contemporary viewer into the problematic
of the past just as much as it inserts the heritage of the past into the
problematic of the present.
 304 Four Films

If this lm had been made for British television, it would doubtless

have been called a drama-documentary in the manner of Peter Watkinss
not dissimilar Culloden. For Latin American critics, it is an example
both of cine rescate, the recovery of history, and of the application of
cine encuesta, the lm of inquiry, to a historical subject. This again is to
place the emphasis on the lms anity with documentary. It is more
than anity, really: the entire conception of the lm is that of docu-
mentary, with the consequence that while Luca, with which it shares a
great deal stylistically, especially in the way the camera is used, remains
rmly within the ctional mode, La primera carga al machete does not.
On the contrary, it represents a high point in the attack on conventional
narrative with which several Cuban lmmakers now engaged, and which
is one of the themes behind Julio Garca Espinosas concept of imper-
fect cinema.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

It was at the end of the 1960s, arising from the experience of Juan Quin
Quin, that Garca Espinosa wrote the essay Por un cine imperfecto (For
an Imperfect Cinema), a polemical reection on the whole practice of
revolutionary lm, which is not only a powerful credo for Cuban cin-
ema but one of the major theoretical statements dening the scope of
the New Cinema of Latin America.1 Much misunderstood, the essay
starts o as a warning against the technical perfection that, after ten
years, now began to lie within the reach of the Cuban lmmakers. Its
argument, however, is more widely applicable, and its implications for
revolutionary lm practice outside Cuba were the subject of heated de-
bate. The thesis is not that technical and artistic perfection necessarily
prevent a lm being politically eectivethat would be absurdbut
that in the underdeveloped world these cannot be aims in themselves.
Not only because to attempt to match the production values of the big
commercial movie is a waste of resources, but also because in the com-
mercial cinema of the metropolis these values become irredeemably
supercial, the beautifully controlled surface becomes a way of lulling
the audience into passive consumption. This is contrary to the needs of
an authentically modern cinema that seeks to engage with its audience
by imaginatively inserting itself and them into social reality, to lm the
world around it without makeup, to make the kind of lm that remains
incomplete without an actively responsive audience taking it up. This
sense of incompleteness without the audience is part of what Garca
Espinosa means by imperfection. Fifteen years after the original essay,

305
 306 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

Garca Espinosa admitted that the term imperfect was confusing, and
explained it this way: art is essentially (or traditionally) a disinterested
activity, but if were in a phase when we have to express interests, then
lets do it openly and not continue to camouage it. And therefore, if art
is substantially a disinterested activity and were obliged to do it in an
interested way, it becomes an imperfect art. In essence, this is how I
used the word imperfect. And this . . . isnt just an ethical matter, but
also aesthetic.2 Sara Gmez, the director in the early 1970s of De cierta
manera, summed up imperfect cinema in her own way in the same year
as Garca Espinosas essay, when she said in an interview about her work
as a documentarist, Cinema, for us, is inevitably partial, determined by
a toma de conciencia, the result of a denite attitude in the face of the
problems that confront us, of the necessity of decolonizing ourselves
politically and ideologically, and of breaking with traditional values, be
they economic, ethical, or aesthetic.3
On the face of it, the concept of imperfect cinema has a number of
similarities with ideas that have been developed within radical lm cul-
ture in the metropolis since the late 1960s, which often invoke the name
of Brecht, are theoretically based in the intellectual techniques of struc-
turalism, and are concerned with the business of deconstruction. For
instance, speaking of the production of the news in the media, it is nec-
essary, according to Garca Espinosa, above all to show the process which
generates the problems . . . to submit it to judgment without pronouncing
the verdict, so as to enable the audience to evaluate it for themselves in-
stead of passively submitting to the commentators analysis, permeated
as it is with a priori assumptions that block the viewers intelligence.
There are dierences, however. For one thing, imperfect cinema is less
dogmatic and sectarian than you frequently nd within radical lm
culture in the metropolis about how to achieve its aims: It can use
whatever genre or all genres. It can use cinema as a pluralistic art form,
or as a specialised form of expression. These questions are indierent to
it, since they do not represent its real problems or alternatives, still less
its real goals. These are not the battles or polemics it is interested in
sparking. The core of imperfect cinema is the call that Garca Espinosa
shares with other key polemicists of third-world struggle, like Frantz
Fanon and Paulo Freire, for cultural decolonization. It therefore asks for
something much more than deconstruction, which instead it subsumes
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 307

as one of its possible methods; and this also gives it a critical stance to-
ward the radical cinema of the metropolis.
It is also more visionary. There is, says Garca Espinosa, a dangerous
trap, a contradiction, liable to beset even the most revolutionary artist
as long as resources and opportunity remain scarce. In ideal conditions,
where the means of production were equally available, this would not
only be socially just, but would also liberate artistic culture: it would
mean the possibility of recovering, without any kind of complex or
guilt feeling, the true meaning of artistic activity, namely, that art is
not work and that the artist is not in the strict sense a worker. Here, it
must be said, the hardheaded Cuban revolutionary seems every bit as
idealist as the student on the barricades in Paris in 1968, except that he
does not fall for thinking that this utopian state of aairs is just around
the corner. He therefore sees that, until such time, there remains a di-
culty: The feeling that this is so, and the impossibility of translating it
into practice, constitutes the agony and at the same time the pharisaism
of all contemporary art. What is needed in this situation, says Garca
Espinosa, is not so much a new cultural policy as a new poetics, based
on an openly partisan belief in the Revolution as itself the highest ex-
pression of culture, because its purpose is to rescue artistic activity from
being just a fragment of the wider human culture. When that has hap-
pened, he says, the old idea of art as a disinterested activity will again be
possible. But for any such thing to come about, what is needed is, para-
doxically, a poetics whose true goal will be to commit suicide, to dis-
appear as such (curious echo of C. L. R. James at the 1968 Cultural
Congress); and to achieve this, the artist must resolutely turn outwards,
to the demands of the revolutionary process, the demands of the con-
struction of a new culture. The Revolution has liberated us as an artis-
tic sector. It is only logical that we contribute to the liberation of the
private means of artistic production. To do this, the way Garca Espinosa
means it, is to challenge, of course, precisely those complexes and guilt
feelings that constitute the agony of contemporary art, whose eect has
been to turn the artists individual neurosis into the central subject of
his or her work; but the narcissistic posture has nothing to do with
those who struggle.
Born of the disquiet that produced Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin,
Garca Espinosa tried to develop some of the ideas of imperfect cinema
 308 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

in practice in a feature-length documentary about Vietnam, Tercer mundo,

tercera guerra mundial (Third world, third world war). The lm was shot
during the period following the cease-re at the end of March 1968. Its
purpose is, on the one hand, to analyze the policies and strategies of the
United States in the conduct of the war, and, on the other, to demon-
strate the essential creativity of the response of North Vietnam. Its manner
is both didactic and demonstrative. It employs a range of documentary
devices, techniques, and styles to show up Washingtons behavior, con-
trasting the inhumanity of the North American war machine with the
very simple but very real humanity of the Vietnamese peasants forced
to take up armed struggle in order to survive. Among key scenes are
those of a carpenter experimenting with an unexploded antipersonnel
bomb to nd out how it works; peasants learning to shoot down enemy
aircraft with mere ries; and, above all, an encounter in which the Cuban
crew hand their camera over to a young Vietnamese woman of eighteen so
she can then direct a short sequence of the lm herself; Garca Espinosa
had argued in his essay for a cinema that would, among other things,
demystify itself. The rough-edged but hardheaded manner in which this
lm delivers its analysis ensures that these lyrical moments do not get
lost in sentimentalism or romanticism. Garca Espinosas thesis is that
the third world third world war anticolonial war war against
an imperialist enemy that can only be vanquished on condition that
the inhuman machinery of its warfare is countered by the simple
human resourcefulness and creativity that are all the third world has to
ght with.
The theme of internationalism in Tercer guerra, tercer guerra mundial
is pursued by icaic in a long series of major documentaries during the
1970s: in the same year comes lvarezs Piedra sobre piedra (Stone upon
stone) about Peru, and in 1972 his lm of Fidels tour of Chile, De Amrica
soy hijo . . . y a ella me debo. Pastor Vega follows his Viva la Repblica of
1972 with a lm on Panama, La quinta frontera (The fth frontier) in
1974. lvarez returns to Vietnam to produce Abril de Vietnam (April in
Vietnam) in 1975, and in 1976 come two lms on Angola, Jos Massips
Angola, victoria de la esperanza (Angola, victory of hope), and La guerra
en Angola (The war in Angola) by Miguel Fleitas, made in cooperation
with the lm department of the Cuban Armed Forces.
Piedra sobre piedra, in the country where it was shot, was a contro-
versial lm. Some Peruvian critics felt it was awkwardly structured. The
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 309

rst half was too general, and the second half, which reported the devas-
tation of the Peruvian earthquake of May 31, 1970, was too disconnected.
According to Isaac Len Frias, lvarez was proposing an equation be-
tween the sixty seconds of the earthquake and the earthquake of under-
development that lasted 365 days a year, to which Juan M. Bullitta
responded that if you were not already familiar with lvarezs style, or
were not familiar with the political concepts he dealt in, then it did not
come across very clearly. Behind these doubts was the key question about
what stance the lm adopted toward the countrys new military regime,
headed by Juan Velasco Alvarado, which claimed to be revolutionary,
held anti-imperialist attitudes, enacted an agrarian reform, reopened
diplomatic relations with Cuba, but declared that it was itself neither
capitalist nor communist.4
lvarez himself had provoked these doubts by his oddball approach
to the subject. Faced with the problem of being an ocial lmmaker, in
other words, the diculties of what to lm and what not to lm and of
whom, the atheistic Cuban chose to structure the entire documentary,
all seventy minutes, around an interview with an army chaplain. In the
circumstances, this was an astute thing to do. You are faced with the
problem of representing to an audience, most of whom have never been
abroad, a picture of a co-lingual country that you yourself have never
visited before. Captain Garca was working-class. As a boy I worked as
an agricultural laborer, he tells the interviewer. He became a priest, he
explains, and then joined the army, because he felt too distant from the
people he preached to. At the end of the lm, when we watch him talk-
ing with a crowd of people, trying to win over his listeners, some of
whom display a noticeable degree of recalcitrance, to believe in Velascos
goodwill, we see him clearly as one of the radicals of the junior ocer
ranks in the Peruvian army whose backing Velasco depended on, but who
were more radical than the leader, for this Velasco was no Fidel. Never-
theless, the chaplainwho does not actually look like onesees the
army, with its obligatory military service, as a school available to the
abandoned classes for their betterment. There was a lot that a Cuban
audience could identify with in such a character, for various and even
contradictory reasons: the familiarity of his way of speaking, and a cer-
tain attitude toward the army as a body that got things done, but also
the oddity of seeing this in a priest for the people of a country where re-
ligion was weak. This was like a signal to the Cubans to remember that
 310 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

revolutionaries could well be religious. In this respect, it is a lm prophetic

of the growing militancy of the radical priesthood throughout Latin
America since the Cuban Revolution, from the actions of individual
priests such as Camilo Torres, through the theology of liberation, to the
integral role of popular religion in the revolutionary movements of Cen-
tral America in the 1980s.
The following year, 1971, lvarez made the rst of three lms about
Chile: Cmo, por qu y para qu se asesina un general? (How, why, and
wherefore is a general assassinated?). This is an extended newsreel of
thirty-six minutes on the assassination of General Ren Schneider on
October 22, 1970, with which the right wing attempted, with cia back-
ing, to destabilize the Popular Unity Government of Salvador Allende at
the very outset, two days before the Chilean parliament was due to ratify
his electoral victory. The last of the group is a shorter extended news-
reel, fteen minutes, lvarezs response to Popular Unitys overthrow
three years later, El tigre salt y mat, pero morir . . . morir (The tiger
pounced and killed, but hell die, hell die). As entirely unorthodox a
newsreel as such a title suggests, the lm is named after a phrase of Marts;
its sound is that of three Chilean songs sung by Vctor Jara, who died
among the numberless victims of the coup who passed through Santi-
agos football stadium; the tragedy and horror are expressed to this ac-
companiment in a varied montage of visuals combined in chunks from
a number of sources, including evocative animated titles. Very rapidly
made, it incorporates sections of material lifted bodily from the second
of lvarezs lms on Chile, De Amrica soy hijo . . . y a ella me debo, a
title drawn, again, from the writings of Mart.
Subtitled Film record of a journey that transcends seas and moun-
tains and unites the Sierra Maestra in the Antilles with the Andean Sierra
in the South, this is a chronicle, running three and a quarter hours in
its full version, of Fidels visit to Chile at the end of 1971: lvarez at the
height of his powers deliberately laying down a challenge to the habits
and theories of commercial cinemaas he himself announced to the
Cuban press in an interview for the lms launching.5
lvarez takes his strategy for holding a lm of such length together
from a unique source: Fidels speeches. A growing inuence on lvarezs
lmmaking, they are paradigmatic in various respects. First, lvarez de-
rives the paradigmatic structure of the lm from the speeches Fidel made
during the trip. He uses them to provide entry points to sequences that
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 311

narrate a key series of moments and aspects of Latin American history,

contrasting them with critical features of the experience of the Cuban
Revolution. The lm alternates between reportage, which is gently paced,
full of relaxed observation of Fidels encounters with the people of
Chile as well as picturesque images of the country, even of a meeting
between Fidel and a llama, and the interpolated sequences with their maps
and engravings and animated textual graphics, which are sometimes
even accompanied by a dierent spoken text. The result of the whole
procedure, which is described by Stuart Hood as deceptively loose-
jointed but powerful in its cumulative eect,6 is exactly, from the point
of view of rhetoric, that of Fidels style of speaking. To examine the
published texts of these speeches shows why: while his form of argu-
ment owes everything to his legal training, the listener is also guided by
a series of metaphors and images, often aphoristically expressed, which
lvarez translates onto the screen through his instinct for montage.

From an economic point of view, 1970 in Cuba was a year of trial. The
attempt during the 1960s to diversify production and reduce the coun-
trys dependence on sugar was less than successful. There was a certain
distance between hopes and realities. Economically, the Revolution had
not yet succeeded in breaking the vicious circle of underdevelopment,
despite Che Guevaras energetic optimism. How could industrial devel-
opment be achieved in a small island under a blockade, cut o from the
continent that forms its natural geographical and economic sphere? The
emphasis on industrial development left a falling sugar harvest and a
reduction in foreign earnings, exacerbated by the fact that most of the
sugar produced went to the Soviet Union, which, even though it paid
preferential prices, did so mostly in nonconvertible currency and was
unable to satisfy the variety of Cubas developmental needs. The year
known as the Year of the Decisive Eort, 1969, was to be devoted to the
reinvigoration of agricultural, and especially sugar, production. The aim
was a ten-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970. The media in all their
formsnewspapers, radio, television, cinema, postersand the polit-
ical organizations, the trade unions, the Committees for the Defense of
the Revolution (Los CDRs) were all enlisted to mobilize the people for
the eort. Resources were diverted, and their diversion caused privations.
icaics production program was reduced: in 1970, twenty-four docu-
mentaries, only one short ction lm of half an hour, and one animation.
 312 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

Even fewer documentaries were made in 1971, as the limited resources

were diverted to make up for the lack of new ction. Five new ction
lms were produced, one of them a half-hour short, one of them a bal-
let lm; the other three were Massips Pginas del diario de Jos Mart
(Pages from the diary of Jos Mart), Los das de agua (Days of water) of
Manuel Octavio Gmez, and Aleas Una pelea cubana contra los demo-
nios (A cuban struggle against the demons)all of them (as we shall
see) very considerable achievements that signicantly develop the the-
matics of Cuban cinema.
In the event, the 1970 harvest fell somewhat short of the target at 8.5
million tons, and Fidel made a momentous speech of self-criticism. It
was still the largest-ever sugar harvest in Cubas history and 18 percent
higher than the previous largest, but the mood was less than celebratory.7
Above all, what the episode revealed was Cubas continuing economic
dependence on sugar and tobacco, and the implication that its growing
reliance on the Soviet Union was no recipe for lifting itself out of the
condition of economic underdevelopment. The mood was not auspi-
cious. The euphoria of the late 1960s evaporated. Then, in 1971, unfor-
tunate events concerning the poet Heberto Padilla created a new crisis
in cultural politics, when his arrest and detention for twenty-eight days
produced an international protest; signatories who included visitors to
the Cultural Congress in 1968 interpreted the incident as a betrayal of
the principles Fidel had so clearly enunciated ten years earlier, and a
sign that Cuba was falling under Soviet inuence culturally as well as
economically.
There is no denying that Padilla was a marked man, for he had at-
tacked the respectable revolutionary writer Lisandro Otero and defended
a book by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who had nally parted company
with his country with a certain amount of self-publicity in 1965. In 1968,
Padilla won the uneac international jury prize with a book of poems
provocatively entitled Fuera del juego (Out of the game). Some of these
poems were skeptical about the Soviet Union and others expressed dis-
enchantment with things in Cuba. They had a cynical tone to them,
and it is easy to see why they produced oense. They were attacked in
the armed forces journal Verde Olivo, and when the book was pub-
lished it carried an introduction by the artists and writers union in the
form of a disclaimer. Padilla, however, did not want to leave the coun-
try, like the sorry rump of liberals who departed one by one during the
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 313

late 1960s (including the lmmakers Fausto Canel, Alberto Roldn,

Roberto Fandio, and Fernando Villaverde).
What happened in 1971 has been recorded by the Chilean writer Jorge
Edwards, who served in Cuba as charg daaires when diplomatic rela-
tions between the two countries were restored under Allende. Edwards,
a Chilean liberal intellectual who kept company with Padilla, is not a
sympathetic observer of the Cuban process, but he recounts the cause
of the poets arrest as a consequence of his unstable mental condition.
Padilla, writes Edwards, began to behave in a somewhat paranoid fash-
ion, carrying the manuscript of a novel around with him wherever he
went. He was over-excited . . . half-crazed, full of indiscretion and ego-
mania. The truth is that Padilla was very fond of hinting at the exis-
tence of mysterious links between him and some secret powers. He had
given me to understand on more than one occasion that he managed to
stay successfully aoat thanks to the conicting currents inside the Gov-
ernment. These hints, which were gments of his passion for inventing
myths, would be accompanied by bellows of self satised laughter.8
These are the sad facts. Padilla was detained, and doubtless had to con-
front an angry Fidel. Then he was released and made a public self-
criticism at a meeting at the artists and writers union. Not a procedure
to appeal to the foreign critics, who had previously looked to Cuba as a
bulwark against Stalinism.
The most lamentable aspect of the Padilla aair, according to Ambro-
sio Fornet, was that it conrmed the positions of extremists on both
sides. Each believed they had found an authentic dissident. Abroad, the
Cold War Cubanologists and the press declared an end to the mystique
of the Cuban Revolution that had attracted so many fellow travelers
among the artists and intellectuals of the rst world. Inside Cuba, the
party dogmatists considered their position vindicated, and the National
Council of Culture (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura) responded with a
shortsighted policy that twinned its aim of hatching a new intelligentsia
by promoting the youngest writers and artists with a populist rhetoric
about the cultural value of amateurism.9
The aair, which did not, says Fornet, involve icaic directly, marks
the beginning of what he has called the quinquenio gris, or ve gray
years, when a vain attempt was made to implement, along with the
Soviet economic model, a sort of criollo socialist realism.10 For two
Cuban lm critics, Rufo Caballero and Joel del Ro, writing in 1995, the
 314 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

countrys economic situation and the revival of intolerance produced a

conjunctural belief that only monolithic unity of thinking could guar-
antee the historical continuation of the revolutionary project.11 The ranks
of artists were lled in the 1970s, they say, by apologists adept at schematic
and saccharine simplications. Literary production descended to the
lowest levels of stolid conformism, and the plastic arts, despite the re-
newal that might have emerged from photorealism, neoexpressionism,
and the turn to gurative painting, failed to break free of this regres-
sion. Only in cinema and musicwith the Nueva Trovadid a spirit
of renovation survive, and in the case of cinema this was largely due,
they believe, to the temporal lag between the conception of a lm and
the moment it reaches the screen, thanks to which icaic was able to
inuence cultural politics rather than become merely its tool.
This was certainly true of the lms released in 1971, although the fol-
lowing year there was a casualty in a highly personal lm by Humberto
Sols, Un da de noviembre (A day in November). This lm was cer-
tainly an oddity, the contemporary tale of a young Cuban revolutionary
who discovers he has a fatal illness and is forced to reassess his life, doing
so with such a degree of honesty that in the conformist attitude of the
moment, icaic decided it was best to delay the lms release. When it
was premiered a year and half later, the decision was also icaics. Sols
himself, as he told the present writer years later, now felt the lm was
too weak, and would not have minded if nobody saw it.

The three ction lms released in 1971 all in one way or another develop
the principles of imperfect cinema. Massips Pginas del diario de Jos
Mart uses almost every imaginable resourcectional, documentary,
realist, surrealist, ballet, cantata, theatricalto create a mobile tapestry
that moves impressionistically through the events the diary obliquely
narrates. It opens with a spoken delivery of the lm credits by a chorus
of simultaneous and overlapping voices, which very much sets the tone
for the lms idiosyncratic form of narration. Images pass rapidly. An
old man carrying a naked baby enters a group of peasants singing un-
accompanied in prayer. Ballet dancers mime a fertility rite. Period en-
gravings of scenes from the late nineteenth century appear. The voices
evoke a time a hundred years ago [when] the nation was born in war.
Color is used expressionistically, with ltered reds and greens, as the
voice of an old man remembers Mart stopping at his house just after
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 315

his clandestine return to Cubas shores. The lm proceeds in episodic

fashion, through scenes of peasants at work, and of Mart and Mximo
Gmez preparing their campaign, and the violence and brutality of raids
by Spanish soldiers in the countryside, always interspersed with the voice
of the diary, until we come to the day of battle and the death of the Apos-
tle from a stray bullet, shown in mute sepia accompanied by an avant-
garde orchestral score by the composer Roberto Valera. A reective epi-
logue concludes the lm with images of Mart in a mural in an artists
studio. A truly hallucinatory lm.
Aleas Una pelea cubana contra los demonios is the farthest back Cuban
cinema has gone in historical reconstruction, a lm about priests and
pirates and demons at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, based on a
work of the same name by the cultural anthropologist Fernando Ortiz,
a leading gure of the rebellious intellectual generation of the 1920s. It
enacts a documented story of the year 1672 (given as 1659 in the lm) in
which the priest of a coastal township, fueled by religious fanaticism,
attempts to remove the entire community to an interior site, out of
reach of pirates and hereticsthe latter a euphemism for Protestant
privateers trading illegally along the coast. He has to contend, not sur-
prisingly, with the opposition of practically all of the landowners he is
seeking to prevail over, among them the distinctive gure of Juan Con-
treras, hedonist, skeptic, and a bitter ideological enemy of the church.
Against Contreras and his ilk, Padre Manuel (marvelously acted by Jos
Rodrguez) calls upon the same methods that the Inquisition uses against
the fearful forces of witchcraft and black magic, superstition and demons,
which it everywhere sees, of course, in the pagan religion of the illiter-
ate. In order to enlist the support of the authorities from Havana, he
concocts a testimony about calamities that have overtaken the commu-
nity, in which he claims to have exorcised hundreds of evil spirits. The
authorities order the community to remove itself to another site, though
some of the townspeople refuse to leave.
This is a lm that in its narrative style rejects all conventions of genre,
and again, as in Memorias, Alea refuses us the chance to identify in the
familiar way with a positive hero. The rst of Aleas lms to be pho-
tographed by Mario Garca Joya, who collaborated on all his subsequent
lms except the last, the uid camera style involves long takes with an
almost constantly moving handheld camera, which allows few of the
syntactical devices of genre lm languagepoint-of-view shots, reaction
 316 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

shots, strategic close-upsby which such identication is normally

established. (In general, of course, it is not a question of these devices
being totally eliminated, but of their not being used in the form of the
articulated system of orthodox narrative dcoupage.) Instead, Alea
creates the loaded atmosphere of a world half real and half mythical, of
brazen individuals and collective hysteria. The lms extraordinary visual
uidity, together with its striking black-and-white photography, leads it
to depart from the straightforward narration of historical facts, but it
also turns the lm into a corrective interpretation of history, a study of
the social and economic forces of seventeenth-century Cuba, with their
demons both spiritual and physical: the theology of the Inquisition, and
the smugglers and pirates who came in the wake of the Spanish colonists.
The lm is rich in the parallels and oppositions contained in its met-
aphors and symbols, especially those built around the similarities and
contrasts, visual and symbolic, between the rituals and ceremonies of
the church and the shamanism of the slaves. This is a tendency toward
the structural organization of symbolic language to be found in several
Cuban lms, like Luca by Humberto Sols and De cierta manera of
Sara Gmez. A raid by pirates, who pillage and rape, is followed with an
attack by invisible predators: during a hellre sermon, a woman is seized
with convulsionsher body twisting as if once again struggling against
the rapists attack. The preaching priest himself seems to be possessed,
the camera moving in on him in close-up, as he cries out that the devil
is always among them, chaos rules over them. It is the islands economic
and political structure that is in chaos. Sugar exports are threatened by
smugglers who prey on shipping and then undercut the market price,
while desperate slaves commit suicide to escape their misery, in the hope
that their bodies will return with their souls to Africa.
The lm serves as an oblique allegory on the situation of contempo-
rary Cuba, centered on the contradiction personied in the contrast
between the skepticism of Contreras, the populism of Padre Manuel,
and the opportunism of Evaristo. To try to dissuade their workforce
from abandoning them, Contreras warns the people of the town against
Padre Manuels promise to lead his followers to a land free of demons,
while Evaristo advises the authorities from Havana of the impending
arrival of a smugglers ship, with which Contreras is involved in doing
business. But if we see in the gure of Contreras elements of a critique
of the church, he is also refracted by his position outside not one, but
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 317

two religious systems. The other, which he is voyeuristically drawn to,

leads him to visit a shaman woman who lives in a cave and goes into a
trance in which she speaks of the river of native blood to come. Her
voice is heard over a blank screen while tachistoscopic images it by, a
frame or two at a timethe faces of Mart, Fidel, el Che. He under-
stands from her vision that the rebellion of the people is inevitable.
Los das de agua, scripted by Manual Octavio Gmez with Bernab
Hernndez and Julio Garca Espinosa, is about the same themes in more
recent times, a story of the political manipulation of religious hysteria
in the 1930s, based on real events in the province of Piar del Ro in
1936. A local woman, Antoica Izquierdo, has become known as a saintly
healer. Long processions of the sick come to her house to receive the
healing she administers with holy waters. With them comes a journalist
after a story, and an opportunist businessman who sets up food stalls.
The place becomes both a sanctuary and a fair. The local doctors, drug-
stores, and priests, seeing their interests threatened, conspire to get rid
of the healer and her followers. There is a death among the sick, and
Antoica is accused of murder. A lawyer seeking the governorship of
the province comes to her defense and wins her freedom, his consequent
popularity winning him election. Once in power, he decides that her
activities now hurt his interests. The army mounts an attack, Antoica
tries to defend herself with holy water, while among her followers, vio-
lence provokes them to respond with violence. But this open act of
rebellion is doomed before it begins, for the journalist has been right
about one thing: What a waste of power! What a stupid woman! People
believe in her and she doesnt know how to lead them!
On one level, the lm is about who pays the costs of sickness in a sick
society. Antoica declares her powers a free gift, an act of social rebel-
lion against the cartel of the priests and medics. But she also declares
that there are diseases that cannot be seen. Like Una pelea cubana . . . ,
this narrative is oered not in the form of a cold and considered histor-
ical reconstruction, but in the shape of a hallucinatory allegory. The
story is told inside out, as it were, and from a series of dierent angles,
like a written narrative that shifts the point of view of the narration be-
tween the dierent characters: Antoica herself, the journalist, the op-
portunist, the fanatic, the politician Navarro, the priest, the municipal
sanitation ocer, the chief of the rural guard. The lm is particularly
memorable for the manner in which the various episodes are plastically
 318 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

expressed in the treatment of color, from the early sequence which nar-
rates the origins of Antoicas powersa vision in which the Virgin saves
her childwhere color is rendered dreamlike through underexposure,
to the wild activity of the scene of the rebellion, which the handheld
camera pictures from within as a participant, with the result that the sur-
face smoothness of orthodox color photography is broken up, not unlike
the rupture of the image in the battle scene of La primera carga. . . .
These two lms about religious and magical beliefs, and the hier-
archy of repression that is built upon them, share important features with
a number of the most distinctive Brazilian lms of the previous decade,
belonging not to the neorealist tendency pioneered by Nelson Pereira
dos Santos, but to the very dierent stylistic impulses, much more ba-
roque and emotional, identied with Glauber Rocha and dubbed trop-
icalism. Thematically, these lms include Ganga Zumba of 1963 by
Carlos Diegues, about the search of escaping slaves for the mythical
black kingdom of their kind; but the main paradigms are two lms by
Rocha, Deus e o Diablo na terra del sol (Black god, white devilliterally
God and the devil in the land of the sun, 1963) and Antonio das Mortes
(1968). Here is a world in which emblematic characters perform stylized
actions in a dreamlike amalgamation of history and legend, epic and
lyric. For Rocha, the mysticism of popular religion in the Brazilian
northeast is a fusion of Catholicism and the motifs of African religion
transplanted with the slave trade, which produces the authentic voice of
the people of these lands, the expression of a permanent spirit of rebel-
lion against constant oppression, a rejection and refusal of the condi-
tion in which they had been condemned to live for centuries. The
Cuban lms are less schematic, less formalist, but the style is in many
respects, visually and in other ways, closely similar. Fundamentally, they
have the same feel for that process, known as syncretism, by which the
symbolic systems of dierent religions are conjoined by a kind of osmo-
sis. In a key scene in Los das de agua, two religious processions, one
Christian, the other Yoruba, meet and fuse: a paradigmatic rendering of
the simultaneous presence in the syncretistic culture, in its practices and
its products, of symbolic elements from historically separate origins,
which have been brought into confrontation and have interpenetrated.
Several documentaries on themes of religion and syncretism were
made during the 1960s, including two lms by Bernab Hernndez on
the Abaku religious society and aboriginal culture in 1963 (Abaku and
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 319

Cultura aborigen). Octavio Cortzar, after making Por primera vez, in-
vestigated the question of syncretism in a twenty-minute documentary
from 1968 with the intriguing title Acerca de un personaje que unos llaman
San Lzaro y otros llaman Babal (About a character some people call
Saint Lazarus and others call Babal). The object of investigation is an
annual religious saints-day celebration in which the worshipers ap-
proach the shrine crawling on their knees to give thanks or to pray for
recuperation from illness. Interspersed with the scenes of the pilgrimage
and festivities are a series of interviews with both participants and com-
mentators, either specialists or just people in the streets. It emerges that
there is considerable confusion about who this Lazarus is. A Catholic
priest maintains that he is a separate person from the Lazarus raised from
the dead, a lay leader of the procession holds the opposite. (Cortzar
playfully intercuts an old lm clip of the raising of Lazarus.) The prove-
nance of the icons of Lazarus to be found in Cuban churches is traced
three of these images come from dierent parts of the Christian world
and suggest dierent associations. But whichever, Lazarus has an alter
ego in Babal, the African god with whom he shares a number of char-
acteristics, most importantly his healing powers. There is some dis-
agreement, too, between people who hold these beliefs to be incompat-
ible with the Revolution, and others who consider them harmless enough.
And there is also the analysis of the cultural historian who sees the phe-
nomenon as a paradigm of syncretism, for Lazarus and Babal are not
separate, the one identied with the other merely for convenience, they
are one and the same, Christian and African at the same timeor in
short, Afro-Cuban.

Another area where Cuban lmmakers have drawn attention to a closely

similar phenomenon is music. A number of documentaries from the
late 1960s on, dealing with dierent aspects of Cuban popular music,
have celebrated its diversity and riches, showing that much of it is a re-
sult of syncretistic processes. Y. . . tenemos sabor (And . . . weve got taste,
1968) by Sara Gmez, who was a trained musician, is a guide to its exotic
range of percussion instrumentsclaves, spoons, maracas, bongos, the
giro (made from gourds), cowbells, horses jawbone, and so onand
their origins, some primitive, some mixed (mulatto).
Musicologists have shown that the evolution of musical forms is also
a long and complicated aair. The habaera, for examplelike the one
 320 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

Bizet included in Carmencan be traced back to the early English coun-

try dance and the French contredanse, transmitted largely through the
Spanish contradanza. However, while Cuba was a Spanish colony, it also
received French musical inuences more directly, as a neighbor of Saint-
Domingue (Haiti) and French Louisiana. Havana itself was a point at
which many cultural inuences coalesced, carried by sailors and their
passengers across the seas. It was a city of sojourn for long-distance
travelers, like the emigrants to Veracruz in Mexico who left a dance on
their way through known in Havana as the chuchumb, which was banned
by the Tribunal of the Sacred Inquisition for the indecency of its forms
and rhythms. This is a constant theme, and all sorts of excuses will do.
In 1809, the journal Aviso de la Habana condemned the French con-
tredanse simply on the grounds of its national origins: Why have we
not disposed of the waltz and the contradanza, those always indecent
fabrications introduced to us by the diabolical French? They are dia-
metrically opposed in their essence to Christianity. Lascivious gestures
and an impudent vulgarity are their constituents, which, from the fa-
tigue and the heat with which the body suers, provoke concupiscence.12
But music dees edict, and the dance continued to evolve, crossing back-
wards and forwards from Cuba to Spain and back to Latin America, to
produce the inimitable lilt of the habanera, which got its name in Spain,
and the danzn, as the Cubans called their own version, and, in Buenos
Aires, the tango (which, when it took New York by storm in the 1920s,
was again subjected to pious protests).
As with instruments and dances, so with song forms, which are often
particularly responsive to social and political currents. De dnde son los
cantantes . . . ? (Where do the singers come from?, dir. Luis Felipe Bernaza,
1976) recalls the career of the Trio Matamoros, three brothers from Ori-
ente who started playing together in 1925, singing serenades under bal-
conies at night. They based their music on a version of a traditional
song form called the son (as in Garca Espinosas Son o no son), which
took shape, the commentary tells us, in the Sierra Maestra in the last
years of the nineteenth century, among singers who were engaged in the
independence struggles and composed satirical verses against the Span-
ish and North Americans alike. The style took a couple of decades to
reach Havana, where, like the equally satirical decimas, it enjoyed great
popularity during the so-called golden period of Cuban music in the
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 321

1930sthe decade following the arrival of rca Victor and Columbia

and the stimulus they gave to commercial music production in Cuba.
The lm celebrates the survival in this music of certain authentic pop-
ular valuesthose that E. P. Thompson describes as the Brechtian values
of irony in the face of moralism and the tenacity of self-preservation
in the midst of all the commercialism, when singers were promoted
under such tags as el tenor de la voz de seda (the tenor with the voice
of silk) and la estrella de la cancin (the star [female] of the song).
Cinema itself, of course, with the coming of sound, contributed to the
process, a succession of lms from dierent countries helping to create
fashions and crazestap dancing after Piccolino, tangos with Boliche,
both in 1935; Spanish music with Nobleza baturra and Morena clara in
1936 and 1937; Mexican music with All en el Rancho Grande and Jalisco
nunca pierde in 1937. But not all the music documentaries of the 1970s
are equally successful in dealing with the problems of this history. Qu
buena canta Ud. (How well you sing, dir. Sergio Giral, 1973) is a homage
to the singer Beny Mor, which interweaves memorabilia and inter-
views with his family and colleagues, but says very little about the man-
ner of his commercial promotionhe was one of the biggest of Cuban
musical stars, whose records captured markets throughout Central Amer-
ica and the northern shores of South America, the hinterland of the
Cuban commercial music business. Vox pop interviews, which gener-
ally follow the line Beny is dead but he lives; his music is neither old
nor modern, testify to his genuine popularity, but their eect, when the
lm is viewed outside its original context as obituary, is to leave an other-
wise highly delightful lm with an excessively populist evaluation of the
music. Yes, his music is very vibrant, but all those prerevolutionary lm
clips of him, where do they come from? There is rather little in this lm
of the approach of imperfect cinema, no questioning of the construc-
tion of the imagery, or of the ideological uses of its musical clothing, no
interrogation of the mythology of popular music (of which Colina
and Daz Torres wrote, speaking of the use of music in the melodrama
and the musical comedy of the time: the melodic motifs of tangos,
rancheros and boleros full a double function: they enhance the specta-
cle, channelling it towards the popular classes, and they serve, in their
own right, to reduce the essential content of the lm to that of conta-
gious tunes).13
 322 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

One of these lms, however, from the late 1970s, La rumba, directed
by scar Valds with a script by Julio Garca Espinosa, confronts the
question head-on. The opening images are of two contrasting snatches
of dance. For the people of Cuba, says a narrator over the rst, this is
a commercial manifestation of the rumba, a commodity, and false.
This, continues the voice over the second, is an authentic rumba. But
there are still lots of Cubans who dont feel it belongs to them. The
rumba is one of this peoples most legitimate artistic creations. What is
the prejudice they hold against it? In the course of forty-ve minutes,
the lm proceeds to trace its historical origins. The word itself comes
from Spain, where it was not originally the name of a dance, but de-
scribed a certain kind of woman, who lives what is called a happy life,
a certain kind of frivolity; in other words, the very name of the dance
involves a prejudice. This is amplied later in the lm: such a prejudice
is typically machista, and the rumba has developed an erotic narrative
version, danced by a couple, which evolved from African fertility ritual
and enacts the possession of the woman by the man. What happened
was that a Spanish word gave a name and an identity to a dance and a
rhythm whose origins were completely African (and in which the eroti-
cism doubtless had dierent cultural meanings). To conrm this thesis,
we learn that there were musical clubs in Cuba, particularly among the
petite bourgeoisie, which, for respectabilitys sake, never danced the
rumba, but took to the danzn instead.
Another lm that deals directly with the African roots of a large part
of Cubas musical heritage is Miriam Makeba, a portrait of the African
singer by Juan Carlos Tabo, made during her tour of Cuba in 1973. There
is a sequence in which she and her band meet with a group of Cuban
musicians and compare notes. Makebas is by no means the purest of
African song; she has adopted harmonies and other elements that are of
modern Western origin and originally alien to the African idiom. Nor,
as she tells her hosts, is she a learned musician. But listening and watch-
ing attentively with growing delight to black Cuban drummers, she de-
clares that If Cuban drummers play, unless they start singing in Span-
ish, I cant tell whether theyre Cuban or African!
Of these lms, only the one by Sara Gmez is lmically remarkable
in any special way. The others are all more or less conventional in their
various uses of commentary, interviews, historical footage, and the lm-
ing of historical relics. The rst impression that Y. . . tenemos sabor makes
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 323

on the viewer is the way its jagged and syncopated cutting captures and
expresses the rhythms of the music it is describing. It is also an excellent
example of imperfect cinema. Toward the end of the lm, the musician
showing us the instruments remarks, But we dont need all these in-
struments, we can just as well make music with bits of iron and sticks.
This, Toms Gutirrez Alea remarks, was Saritas attitude to making
lms.14
There is another musical documentary, however, Hablando del punto
cubano (Speaking of typical Cuban music, dir. Octavio Cortzar, 1972),
which is an altogether exceptional lm, the eect of a truly delightful
paradox built into its commentary, which is sung instead of spoken.
The word punto in the title cannot really be rendered into English; it
refers to the art of the verbal improvisation in song form, either by an
individual singer or by a pair of singers engaged in what is called a con-
troversia, or controversy. Again we are given historical information: the
punto has a Spanish heritage. It became an art of itinerant campesino
singers, who in this way carried news and comment around the country-
side. But instead of dying out, a new generation of professional campesino
musicians grew up in the 1930s with the opportunities provided by the
radio. Later, many of these artistes suered eclipse, but one of them is
featured through the length of the lm, the incomparable Joseito Fer-
nndez. His is a name inseparable in Cuba from one of the Cuban songs
best known internationally, Guantanamera. The form in which it is
known abroad, appropriately enough set to verses by Jos Mart, is a re-
cent adaptation, popularized in the early 1960s in solidarity with the
Cuban Revolution by the North American folk protest singer Pete Seeger,
who learned it from a student. According to Alejo Carpentier, the tune
of the songs opening phrases is none other than the old Spanish ro-
mance Gerineldo, preserved through the centuries by the most authen-
tic peasant singers.15 In the 1930s, it became Joseito Fernndezs theme
tune, when he had a weekly radio program and used it to improvise a
popular commentary on politics and current events. Here in this lm it
turns up in a new guise: this is its commentary.
The whole lm plays on the paradox of using lm, whose personae
are not physically present to the audience but only projected, and can
therefore have been manipulated this way and that, to portray an impro-
vised art form. In fact, it takes the bull by the horns. Lots of people,
sings Joseito, would like to know if this stus improvised or not; and
 324 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

Hablando del punto cubano (Octavio Cortzar, 1972)

there is a spontaneous discussionone of those discussions that is pro-

voked by bringing a group of people round a camera and asking them
certain questionsamong a group of workers outside a bus factory,
arguing about the kind of artistry involved in the practice of the punto.
One speaker accuses another of credulity at the idea that a controversia
is really improvised. The singers, he says, have so much practice and
preparation that it isnt really improvisation, it is virtually prepared, they
dont really have to improvise because theyve got it all stored up in
their heads. It clearly, however, looks very dierent from that in the ex-
ample of a controversia we see on camera.
Cleverly, the camera operator has kept the camera trained part of the
time on the singer in the pair who is not at that moment singing, and
the editor has left the shot to pan backwards and forwards without
cutting so we know they have not cheated: the look of concentration
on the silent singers listening face reveals all: the moment, listening
to his rival, when he slowly tilts his head and breaks into a broad and
very special smile of anticipation, as he discovers how to couch his
reply. Other singers show similar evidenceit is impossible not to re-
call the passage of Walter Benjamins in which he talks about the way lm
makes it possible to analyze minutiae of behavior that were previously
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 325

too eeting sometimes even to be noticed. And carrying it all along, is

the masterly Joseito himself, a graceful, thin, tall mustachioed gure,
who wanders through gates, gardens, and down streets, a oating pres-
ence, teasing us with his improvised singing commentary, challeng-
ing us, it seems, to challenge him over it, knowing, of course, we can-
not, and even if we could, it would have to be on his terms, and he
would win.

In 1971, Roberto Fernndez Retamar published another key essay of

Cuban revolutionary aesthetics, called Caliban. The old Caliban, he
said, the base, deformed half-man half-sh of Shakespeares last play,
was dead; a new one was being born. He is not the only Caribbean in-
tellectual to see Caliban this way. He refers himself in his essay to a
number of others, including George Lamming, Edward Braithwaite, and
Aim Csaire.
Why Caliban? Who is he? His name, as numerous scholars tell, is an
anagram of canibal, which derives from carbal, carib, Caribbean. All
sorts of historical evidence reveals that The Tempest alludes to the dis-
covery of the Americas: Shakespeares island is the poetic symbol of
the islands where Columbus rst landed and where an English ship was
wrecked in 1609, providing the Elizabethan playwright with a rsthand
 326 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

Joseito Fernndez in Hablando del punto cubano

account upon which to draw. It was, moreover, a topical play, for the
conquest of the New World, and in England especially the renewed
project for the colonization of Virginia, was a burning question of the day.
The central theme of the play, to modern Caribbean eyes, is the utter
opposition between master and slave, colonizer and colonized. Implaca-
ble realist that he was, says Fernndez Retamar, Shakespeare created in
the gure of Caliban the other face of the nascent bourgeois world. He
takes the noble savage from his contemporary Montaigne and turns
him into the pathetic gure that the European colonizers produced in
those they conquered and brutally exploited. The attitude of the colo-
nizer is roundly represented in Prospero:

I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowd thy purposes
With words that made them known.

And the attitude of the rebellious slave in Calibans reply:

You taught me language; and my prot ont

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language! (Act 1, scene 2)
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 327

The Tempest has exerted particular fascination in Latin America ever

since the Argentinian Juan Rod wrote an essay at the turn of the nine-
teenth century on the nature of Latin American culture, called Ariel.
His interpretation of the play followed traditional lines: Caliban was
base, Ariel was the imprisoned spirit of creativity. The twist in the tale
was that Rod identied Caliban with the United States of America, the
imperialist power in the north that, as his contemporary Mart explained,
had come to represent the major threat to the integrity of Latin Amer-
ica. In the second half of the century, Rods version was overturned.
The imperialists became Prospero, the tyrannical and sadistic foreign
duke who exercises power through magic. Caliban was his militant anti-
colonialist opponent.
Ariel also changesProsperos other slave, his houseboy, who, just as
Caliban performs Prosperos physical labor, carries out his spiritual de-
sires. Previously, Ariel, who openly demands his liberty from Prospero,
was seen as the symbol of the enslaved creative spirit, the symbol of
everything aspiring, in contrast to Calibans baseness. But now the Ca-
ribbean novelist George Lamming calls him Prosperos intelligence agent:
the archetypal spy, the embodimentwhen and if made eshof the
perfect and unspeakable secret police.16 In the version of the play that
the Martinique poet Aim Csaire wrote for a black theater company in
1969, Ariel becomes a mulatto; and having carried out Prosperos wishes
against his own better judgment and deantly made his scruples known,
Prospero replies, Here we go! Your crisis! Its always the same with you
intellectuals! But at least Ariel now has a choice: either to continue
serving Prospero, or to turn his back on him and join with Caliban in
the real liberation struggle.
Aspects of the Caliban theme found expression in Cuban cinema dur-
ing the 1970s in a series of lms about slavery in which the image of the
slave is powerfully deconstructed: Sergio Girals trilogy, El otro Francisco,
Rancheador, and Maluala, Aleas La ltima cena, plus an assortment of
documentaries. They are lms in which the gure and historical per-
sonage of the slave is seen in an entirely new light.
El otro Francisco, on which Alea and Garca Espinosa collaborated
with the director and Hctor Veita in writing the script, is (as we saw
earlier) a piece of deconstruction that has been worked upon its source,
a romantic abolitionist novel of 1839, not a free adaptation but the prod-
uct of a careful critical operation. The North American lm theorist
 328 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

Julianne Burton puts this lm forward, along with Girn and De cierta
manera, as a paradigm of the subversion of the dominant phenomenon
of cinema as spectacle. Girn simultaneously imitates and subverts the
blood-and-guts war movie; De cierta manera subverts the Hollywood
romance; and El otro Francisco critiques the historical melodrama.17
Rancheador is similarly based on a literary source, Diario de un ran-
cheador (Diary of a rancher) by Cirilo Villaverde (who also wrote the
much better known Cecilia Valds on which Humberto Sols based his
epic, but less than successful, Cecilia of 1983). Villaverde, in turn, based
his novel on the diary of a certain Francisco Estvez, a hunter of runaway
slaves in the pay of the landowners. The lm adopts a dierent aesthetic
strategy. Cast in the form of an orthodox but ingeniously crafted narra-
tive, Rancheador pictures Estvez as one of the bloodiest and most
ambitious of mercenaries. He not only hunts down slaves in their palen-
ques, hidden communities in the hills, but he employs his henchmen in
repressing outbursts of rebellion, black or white, slave or free. His be-
havior threatens to expose the maneuvers of the sugar landowners who
employ him, in their factional conicts with the smallholding coee
growers. He tries to vindicate himself by setting out to hunt for the leg-
endary woman leader of the runaway slaves, Melchora. But Melchora is
a mythological personage, a symbol to the slaves of their freedom, a
psychological weapon of combat. In his blind and obsessional fury,
Estvez commits a series of crimes that begin to contradict the class in-
terests he serves, and his employers, ever ready to sacrice their bloodi-
est servants when necessary, abandon him to his destruction. Although
it undoubtedly has elements in it of an epic western, this is actually
much less of a genre movie than this description makes it sound, rst
because of the dialectical analysis of the historical forces involved, and
second because of the potent Afro-Cuban symbolism of the myth of
Melchora and its eect, among other things, in dissolving the individu-
alism of the storys heroes into the collective.
This is also a strategy adopted in Maluala, which deals with the least
documented area of the history of slavery. The lms title is the name of
a palenque, or settlement of escaped slaves, one of a group of such set-
tlements somewhere in the eastern, mountainous part of the island,
though exact time and place remain unspecied. The story describes
how the Spanish set out to divide the leaders of the palenques against
each other, with considerable but not total success. The three lms of
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 329

the trilogy taken together show a development of consciousness from

singular to collective, from individual resistance to collective struggle,
from suicide to battle. Combining professional and nonprofessional
actors, and with music by Sergio Vitier, Maluala shared the top prize for
ction at the rst Havana international lm festival in 1979 with the
Brazilian Geraldo Sarnos Coronel Delmiro Gouveia.
Aleas lm La ltima cena (The Last Supper) is a subtle, ironic fable,
an allegory of the religious hypocrisy of a plantation owner toward his
slaves, set in a time just after the Haitian Revolution of 1795. The Cuban
landowners are suddenly instilled with the fear of slave rebellion at the
same time that the disruption of agriculture in Haiti oers them the
chance to improve their position in the international market, but only
on condition that they buy more slaves and intensify their exploitation,
which only increases, of course, the dangers of rebellion. The Count of
Casa Bayona, brilliantly played by Nelson Villagra, is a sensitive man,
whose stomach turns at the sight of the treatment his overseer metes
out to a runaway slave, Sebastin, when he is punished by having his ear
cut o. The count, who sees himself as a source of protective Christian
love toward his slaves, would rather they accepted their lot with humil-
ity. Accordingly, he selects twelve of them, including the runaway, for an
Easter ritual: rst he symbolically washes their feetvery symbolically,
for touching the black mens feet oends his delicate constitutionand
then he wines and dines them the evening before Good Friday.
What follows is a tour de force of black comedy. As Philip French re-
ports, At the centre of the movie is a modern re-creation of the Last
Supper that inevitably brings to mind the beggars blasphemous celebra-
tion of the Eucharist in Viridiana. But Aleas mentor, Buuel, contrived
that scene to produce a brief shocking frisson. Here it is the occasion for
an extended, sinuous debate on the human condition in which the pious
Christian, not his insulted and injured guests, brings the precepts of his
religion into question. . . . He has a little trouble in explaining to some
of his guests the dierence between transubstantiation and cannibal-
ism, and not all of his temporary disciples understand his Franciscan
sermon about the need to embrace their misery joyfully. But they think
hes a grand, generous fellow, and when he frees an aged bondslave
(who immediately asks if he can stay on anyway), theyre convinced of
his good faith. However, after the Count slumps on the table asleep, the
suppers Judas-gure comes into his own. He is, of course, the slave
 330 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

Sebastian who regales the company with a forceful parable of his own
about Truth and Dishonesty, and how decapitated Truth put on the
head of Lies and went around the world deceiving people.18
This parable of Sebastins is his African reply to the Christian myth
of Genesis and the Fall. When Olo made the world he made it com-
plete with day and night, good and bad, Truth and Lie. Olo was sorry
for Lie, who was ugly, and gave him a machete to defend himself. One
day Truth and Lie met and had a ght. Lie cut o Truths head. Head-
less, Truth took Lies head. Now Truth goes around with the body of
Truth and the head of Lie. The counts explanation of transubstantia-
tion is similarly translated by his listeners, one of whom acts out the
tale of an African family fallen on bad times. In order to get money to
buy food, a father sets out to sell his son into slavery, but his son turns
on him and sells him in place of himself. Whereupon the family turns on
the son and delivers him up to the authorities, who sell him in turn
into slavery, and they end up that way eating twice as much. What we
get in this long scene is a dialogue between master and slavean extraor-
dinary achievement by the scriptwriters, Toms Gonzlez and Mara
Eugenia Haya, as well as Alea himselfa metadialogue of symbolic mean-
ings, which, the North American critic Dennis West observes, enacts
the profound and intricate Hegelian dialectic of lordship and servitude
traced in The Phenomenology of Mind.19
This dialogue is prepared by the early scenes of the lm, and especially
the relationships between the three men who administer the counts es-
tate: the overseer, the priest, and the sugarmaster. The clergyman preaches
moral platitudes to the slaves while grumbling about the godlessness of
the overseer. The overseer, however, is much more the counts alter ego,
which some of the slaves realize perfectly well. (The ones who dont are
those who, around his table, continue to believe in the counts good
faith.) The most equivocal of the three is the sugarmaster, an educated
Frenchman with a scientic mind, analyzing and improving the meth-
ods of rening sugar. He develops a system of burning cane waste for
fuel to replace the depleted forests. He explains to the count that a nice
new piece of English machinery would only be worth purchasing if he
also got more slaves to increase production. Sympathetic to the suer-
ing of the slaveshe later conceals the fugitive Sebastin from the slave
hunterthe sugarmaster teases the priest about the secrets of his art,
which, he says, come from the mysteries of nature herself. To the priests
 Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies 331

cautious inquiry if such beliefs are not a little like witchcraft, he re-
sponds with the question whether the church is not also witchcraft, and
dangles a little bag containing the substances needed for the transmuta-
tion of raw cane juice into rened sugar, taunting him with its mystery:
It seems that what is to become white must rst be black. But there is
no magic in the substance: its caca de poule, chicken shit. Its all up
here, he says, tapping his head. He shows o the products: decreasing
shades of brown and nally pristine white. But not all of it, he says, is
capable of being puried, just like souls in purgatory.
And then it is that we come to the grotesque comedy of the supper,
and at its center, a key symbolic gesture: Hegels notion of recognition,
writes West, means that the master depends on his bondsman for ac-
knowledgement of his power, indeed for assurance of his very selfhood.
As the count reiterates his order that Sebastian recognize him [the Judas
parallel] the camera emphatically dollies in on their juxtaposed faces,
and a tense silence reigns. The slaves eventual answer is to spit in the
masters facea brutal refusal to recognize the others lordship and the
graphic expression of the bondsmans true self-consciousness: in spite
of his actual bondage, the slaves mind is his own.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
One Way or Another

In 1974, Julio Garca Espinosa got involved with the Italian lm critic
Guido Aristarco in an altercation about what was going on in Cuban cin-
ema. The occasion was the Rencontres Internationales pour un Nouveau
Cinma in Montreal, a gathering of some seventy-ve radical lmmakers
from all over the world, together with critics, distributors, and political
activists given to using lm. There were, reported John Hess in the North
American lm journal Jump Cut, several areas of awkward political dis-
agreement that came to light during the course of the event, especially a
series of misunderstandings between European and Latin American
participants that reected, he said, their very dierent relationships to
the institutional structures of both lm industry and state in the two
continents. It was clearly a variation on this theme when the Italian
criticized Cuban cinema for the peril of allowing the portrayal of tri-
umphalist heroes rather too much like those of socialist realism. It is
not to deny that the nature of the heroic icon may well be a barometer
of certain critical aspects of a society to say that Aristarcos criticism
seemed not only to the Cubans but to other Latin Americans present to
be schematic and unjust. To be sure, it was true of some of the early
Cuban lms like El joven rebelde, but it could hardly be said to apply to
the astonishing output of the late 1960sMemorias del subdesarrollo,
Luca, and others, though it is also the case that in one or two of the
very latest lms at the time, like El hombre de Maisinic (The Man from
Maisinic, dir. Manuel Prez, 1973), the problem was beginning to crop
up again. There was some general discussion about the question, but

332
 One Way or Another 333

Garca Espinosa provided a more considered reply in his own paper to

the meeting, where he stepped back to look at the whole problem of
militant cinema in the particular situation of a third-world revolution
in power.
We controlled the means of production and the cinemas, he began,
but after ten years we had to recognize that we werent yet the masters
of these cinemas because, quite simply, one cannot show only revolu-
tionary lms in them.1 It was necessary, he explained, to undertake
rst a preliminary stage in the decolonization of the screens in terms of
the concrete choice of lms available on the international market, and
the rst step was that Cuban audiences were able to see lms from every-
where, not just North American lms as before the Revolution. But
there was a problem: the majority of lms they found themselves show-
ing left a great deal to be desired ideologically speaking. The situation,
he admitted, led to absurdities, such as showing Japanese lms just be-
cause the faces of the heroes werent white. He was saying implicitly
that whatever it was in Cuban cinema Aristarco found to be suspicious,
it didnt come, as the Italian was arguing, from some kind of mythical
leftist aesthetic orthodoxy, it was a material consequence of the coloniza-
tion of the screens by the capitalist metropolis. Jorge Fraga thought the
problem was getting worse: there were many lms in the 1960s that were
ideologically acceptable. In the 1980s, mainstream cinema came to be
more and more dominated by violence and pornography.2
The Cubans had been able, said Garca Espinosa, to resolve the prob-
lem of informing people more adequately about the society they lived in.
But a cinema, he suggested, that provides its audience with more authen-
tic and relevant information is relatively easy to accomplish. What re-
mains the greater challenge is entertainment. The explosion of the tech-
nologies of mass communications in the 1960s, he said, had produced a
highly paradoxical situation in Cuba. All over the world, people were
seeingmostly on the small screena growing range of highly infor-
mative documentary images. Although there was much in their form of
presentation and contextualization that needed to be questioned, the
problem in Cuba, because of the isolation forced upon it, was that the
images that reached them from abroad were virtually all ctional. Cuban
lmmakers were consequently confronted with a battle between two
kinds of image, two types of cinema, documentary and ction, which
appeared fundamentally like a struggle between authenticity and false-
 334 One Way or Another

hood. The audience continued, howeverand why not?to reach for

the ctional image, to satisfy what are, after all, perfectly real needs for
the dramatization of experience, which there have always been aesthetic
forms to satisfy. This, said Garca Espinosa, was a most dicult and
delicate problem for them.
The truth is that a number of Cuban features during the 1970s could
be said to have succumbed before this problem by adopting the weak
solution. In a way, this is because the very thing Garca Espinosa had
warned about in introducing the idea of cine imperfecto had come to
pass. Cuban lmmakers had grown so much more condent in their con-
trol over the medium that they now took the very codes of Hollywood
narrative and started playing around with them. The result was a series
of lms that included, in 1973, El extrao caso de Rachel K. (The strange
case of Rachel K., dir. scar Valds) and El hombre de Maisinic and
Patty-Candela (dir. Rogelio Pars) in 1976; and a year later, Cortzars El
brigadista and another lm by Manuel Prez, Ro Negro. To put it crudely,
these are all lms that swap around the baddies and the goodies and
play a few narrative tricks, and end up as Cuban versions of genre movies.
Becauseexcept for Ro Negrothey are all based on real people and
events, this has an eect of mythologizing recent Cuban history.
El extrao caso de Rachel K. is a lm noir, following the lines of a
newspaper investigation, which tries rather too self-consciously to use
the iconography of the genre as a kind of pathetic fallacy for the doom-
laden mood of the time. It is set in 1931, a year before the fall of the dic-
tator Machado. Ignoring a police raid on a meeting of tobacco workers,
the press becomes obsessed with the sordid murder of a French nightclub
dancer. While the workers leader is assassinated in prison, the murder
investigation threatens to reveal corruption in high places, and Machado
is forced to silence the newspapers. El hombre de Maisinic is also based
on real events, concerning an undercover agent, played by Sergio Corri-
eri, in the Escambray mountains in the early 1960s who inltrates and
destroys a band of counterrevolutionaries supported by the cia. A hom-
age to the secret hero of the Revolution, here the genre is a mlange of
western and thriller, transposed to a Cuban rural setting that gives the
lm the frisson of using the mythology of the western to implicitly
critique the ideology of the western. According to Fornet, it was entirely
expectable that a movie like this, with all the right elementsa popular
 One Way or Another 335

subject, full of action and violence, a hero played by a charismatic ac-

torwould nd a large audience, but no one, he says, could have pre-
dicted the overnight success it became at the box oce, which turned it
into a model much imitated both in subsequent lms and in serialized
form on Cuban television. If foreign critics expressed alarm at what
appeared an unpardonable concession to the populism of Hollywood-
style narrative, Fornet sees this response as a prime instance of the
dierence that is made by the space in which a lm is viewed, a result of
the dierent sociocultural codes that are called into play by dierent
viewers in dierent places. The Cuban audience, with its own concrete
knowledge of the events depicted, is less interested in the authenticity of
the discourse than in that of its referent.3
In a similar vein, Patty Candela is an espionage movie about opera-
tions against the cia in 1961 that shifts its point of view from that of the
conspirators to that of the Cuban security forces, but then nds it nec-
essary to tack on an epilogue. Ro Negro, Manuel Prezs second fea-
ture, is a Cuban western set on a ranch in the Escambray at the time of
the Bay of Pigs, in which Tirso, a revolutionary militiaman, son of a
peasant whose land was seized in the bad years before the Revolution,
slugs it out with Chano, a counterrevolutionary who had been involved
in the land seizure. The greatest delights in this last lm are the superb
performances of Sergio Corrieri as the self-searching Tirso and the
Chilean actor Nelson Villagra as the thwarted Chano, but the genre for-
matand especially the spectacular shoot-out with which the lm
endsoverwhelms the attempt that had been made to mold the char-
acter of Tirso dierently from the conventional genre hero, above all by
introducing contradictions in his personality and a level of political dis-
course that Hollywood would never permit. As for Sergio Corrieri, after
Maisinic and Ro Negro he withdrew from screen acting in order, he
said, to avoid getting typecast as Cubas principal male lead, and went to
work instead in community theater.
Mention should be made of a visual feature in several of these lms
that may be judged as symptomatic: the rather frequent and often ragged
use of the zoom. A predilection for the zoom is found in a good deal of
Cuban cinema, including the style developed by lvarezs principal cam-
eraman, Ivn Napoles, where it expresses the rough spontaneity of many
of the best Cuban documentaries. In the case of ction, however, at least
 336 One Way or Another

in lms like these that are stylistically imitative of Hollywood, the use of
the zoom is more intrusive than the smoother and more facile zooming
that became something of a Hollywood trademark of the period.
However, the fundamental diculty in these lms (except perhaps
for Rachel K.) is that of trying to portray the very real anonymous hero-
ism that many people showed during the course of the Revolution in a
form inseparable from the traditional imagery of machismo. El brigadista
shows perhaps most clearly what the dangers are of this approach, be-
cause it is a lm of adolescent adventure and initiation, on a model whose
original, perhaps, is Tom Sawyer. The crux of the diculty is contained
in a pair of incidents that reveal the obverse of machismo: the implica-
tions it has for the imagery of women. In the rst, our young hero
Mario meets with a girl by chance at night; they are carried o by ado-
lescent dreams of rst love, and Mario pledges himself to her with the
gift of his watchit doesnt work, but he tells her its like a ring. In
the second, he is almost seduced by the wife of a gusano whom he visits
in her house quite legitimately as the village teacher, while her husband
is in the swamps with an armed band of counterrevolutionaries. There
is a clear and unfortunate equation at work here, in which revolution-
ary brigadista equals romantic idealism equals the danger of corrup-
tion, which can only come as an act of treachery on the part of a
woman tainted by sharing her bed with a traitor to the Revolution.
Both these women, the virgin and the adulteress, have virtually no other
presence in the lm than this, and both are the crudest of misogynist
stereotypes.
These were all successful lms with the audiencesome more than
othersand how they came to be made is not dicult to understand. On
the one hand, the political climate of the 1970s encouraged a greater de-
gree of populism; on the other, icaic frowned on aesthetic conformism
and did not consider that there was any a priori reason why such ap-
proaches should not be tried. At the same time, there are other lms
that, though not as immediately arresting as those which immediately
preceded, still attempt to come to terms more critically with the prob-
lems of narrative and representation. Manuel Octavio Gmez, for ex-
ample, did so twice in the mid-1970s, in Ustedes tienen la palabra (Now
its up to you, 1974) and Una mujer, un hombre, una ciudad (A man, a
woman, a city, 1977). These two lms, both highly accomplished, are
concerned with issues that, although of universal concern, are also subjects
 One Way or Another 337

of particular political debate within the Cuban revolutionary process:

the administration of justice and the problems of urban renewal. This
makes for certain diculties in assessing them. A lot of our recent lm
theory, as John Hess points out in discussing these lms in Jump Cut,
condemns conventional narrative means as hopelessly tainted by bour-
geois ideology, which the imperfect cinema thesis largely seems to con-
rm. It is consequently pretty easy to pick out various lms that oend
from both points of view. But with these two lms we nd ourselves in an
uncertain position to judge how eectively they may conduct a political
dialogue with the audience, which in Hesss opinion suggests that they
raise questions about the universal applicability of antinarrative theories.
At any rate, if bourgeois lms, he says, include politics and social issues
at all, it is usually as a background theme which the lm-maker soon
abandons in order to concentrate on the moral and romantic concerns
of a few central characters. Manuel Octavio Gmezs two lms, how-
ever, move in the opposite direction. They open with moral questions
and move out to the underlying historical and political questions.4
Ustedes tienen la palabra deals with ctional events seven years earlier
than the year of its release. Eight years have passed since the overthrow
of Batista. The heroic struggle against imperialist military intervention
is past, the October crisis is history, the remaining counterrevolutionary
bandits have been routed. The Revolution has entered resolutely on the
tasks of reconstruction. The institutionalization of the new Communist
Party has begun. But the new society is still only in process of formation
and old attitudes persist.
The lm opens with one of those pre-title sequences that have become
a hallmark of Cuban cinema: A re rages at night in a wood, a large
thatched building burns. People rush around trying to put it out. Fol-
lowing the titles, we nd ourselves among the ruins of the building: it
has been turned into a court of law and a trial is in progress of a group
of people accused of arsoncounterrevolutionary sabotage. The camera
roams across the shell of the building, a warehouse in the Ro Palmas
Forestry Collective, and as it emerges how the arsonists had tried to do
their dirty work elsewhere and failed, the trial broadens out to become
a general investigation by the community of itself. The rst of the ac-
cused was, before the revolution, a manager for the previous owner of the
land, who now lives in the United States. The second was the same mans
chaueur. They deny their guilt, and, as the trial proceeds to uncover an
 338 One Way or Another

intricate story, it becomes clear that in a way their particular guilt is

not the main issue; for the lm becomes a Brechtian demonstration of
the real concerns of popular justiceit brings to mind the atmosphere
of the prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circlewhich is not so much a
matter of facts and sworn evidence as the investigation of the state of
consciousness in the community, as well as the circumstances of the
crime and the political nature of another kind of guiltthe guilt of
those whose lack of consciousness allowed the crime to happen in the
rst place. As the story is pieced together through ashbacks corre-
sponding to the successive stories told by defendants and witnesses, the
investigation takes in the lack of proper planning and economic con-
trols in the collective, the disorganization of the labor process, the im-
proper use of resources, and poor communication between the union
and the administration. A central fact, immediately obvious to the Cuban
viewer, is the absence in the collective of a party caucus. According to
Leopoldo Perdomo reviewing the lm in Juventud Rebelde (April 1,
1974), the lm reveals ve kinds of deciency, which also include the
persistence of certain negative religious attitudes.
But this makes the lm sound schematic and even doctrinaire, which
it certainly is not. In fact, every eort was taken to avoid it being so. It
was shot on location with the active participation of local people who
contributed to the script, especially, according to the assistant director
Fernando Prez (Granma, March 15, 1974), in the scenes of the assembly
and in the staging of the re. To achieve greater authenticity, the lm
was shot in 16 mm and then blown up to 35 for cinema release, like De
cierta manera by Sara Gmez, which allowed the cameraman, Pablo
Martnez, a more than usually exible and uid, and hence intimate,
style of lming. It is true that the narrative is linear, but as Manuel
Octavio Gmez himself explained, in La primera carga . . . , the interviews
and the reportage themselves produced the analysis; in Los das de agua,
the successive subjective visions of each character provided more and
more information for an understanding of certain facts; in this lm,
the narrative simply follows the lines of the judicial inquiry.5 Yet the
ashbacks are not as simple in their internal structure as this implies.
They are a means of fusing the incompleteness of the various individual
points of view of the protagonists; on occasion they even begin with
one character and end with another. The result is that while the lm
foregrounds individual behavior, it does not psychologize it. At the
 One Way or Another 339

same time, instead of the mechanical notion that peoples behavior will
change as a result of improvements in economic planning and eciency
and material improvement in their conditions of life, the lm poses the
question exactly the other way around: how are these improvements to
come about if the imperfect state of peoples consciousness impedes the
achievement of the more rational organization of production?
The plot of Una mujer, un hombre, una ciudad is somewhat more
complex and diuse. Gmez takes up material he lmed nine years ear-
lier in 1968 for a documentary on the rapidly growing port and indus-
trial town of Nuevitas in the province of Camageythe city of the
titleand uses it as the context for two parallel biographies. Marisa,
the towns director of housing, has been killed in a car accident. Miguel,
a young Havana-trained sociologist, reluctantly returns to his native
city to replace her, he believes, temporarily. He becomes increasingly
obsessed, however, with nding out who Marisa was, and, as he talks to
the people who knew herfamily, friends, and colleaguesthe lm
develops, as John Hess points out, a format of ashbacks over her life
resembling that of Citizen Kane. He starts out, Hess observes, with very
personal reasons for conducting this investigation. The ghost of Marisas
exemplary political life suocates him. Everyone he talks to describes
Marisa in glowing terms and he feels himself unfavorably compared
with her. But he cannot comprehend the records she has left behind,
cannot gure out the basis on which she allocated housing, and thinks
she did it subjectively, with none of the scientic methods and rigor he
has learned at the university in Havana: and he wants to prove her
wrong to validate himself.
As he discovers more and more about Marisa, however, and at the
same time becomes increasingly involved with the city and its people,
he begins to change. He becomes uncomfortable with his Havana friends,
including his architect wife, whose lack of relationship, personal or po-
litical, with the people for whom her apartments are intended, utterly
contrasts with Marisa. In the end, he decides to abandon Havana and
his wife and stay in Nuevitas. The critique of the postrevolutionary
Havana intelligentsia that the lm thus elaborates makes it a successor
to the concerns of Memorias del subdesarrollo. It is also directed toward
the dierence between the theory that is taught in the academy, includ-
ing the misconceptions of various new administrative practices, and the
reality to which they have to be applied.
 340 One Way or Another

Moreover, in contrast to the stereotypical portrayal of women in the

genre lms, Gmez clearly takes the question of women in the Revolu-
tion very seriouslyand has found in Idalia Anreus an ideal actress for
the character of Marisa, full of nervous energy and determination, just
as she had so marvelously accomplished the role of Tulipa ten years
earlier. We nd her, immediately after the Revolution, arguing for the
right of women to work in the docks. Her husband supports her in nd-
ing another job when the male dockworkers force the women to quit,
but, as Hess remarks, when she becomes increasingly involved with her
work and starts attending long meetings after hours, her husband rebels
and asks her to quit. She refuses and the marriage ends. Although she
then nds herself unable to handle an involvement with another man,
Hess is substantially right (he exaggerates a bit) that Gmez has some-
what idealized her character: Since she basically serves . . . as a symbol
of the revolutionary woman, of the New Woman, he portrays her as
morally superior to everyone else. She exhibits the greatest sensitivity to
the problems of ordinary people and the greatest possible commitment to
the Revolution. She can stand up to men with a great deal of strength . . .
and can articulate the needs of . . . other women, children, the sick, the
uneducated peasants and workers. Nonetheless, her basic role . . . is pas-
sive; she becomes an example, a symbol. She does not propel the plot
forward but serves as the locus of moral values . . . the model revolu-
tionary woman as imagined by men.
Hess concludes his account of these two lms by observing that, in
contrast, De cierta manera (One way or another) by Sara Gmez is a
unique example of a Cuban lm in which the female lead is an ordinary
person with no symbolic baggage to carry around with her. By tragic
mischance, Sara Gmez became the rst Cuban director whose work
could be seen as a wholebut an imperfect whole, like the imperfect
cinema she practiced: she died, from asthma, as De cierta manera, her
rst feature, was being edited; it was completed under the supervision
of Alea and Garca Espinosa.
The editing, at the moment of her death, was well advanced. Most se-
quences were already cut, and the commentary had been planned, though
not all of it written. However, her death obviously delayed completion,
which was further held up by technical problems in the laboratory, in-
cluding damage suered by the negative. In the end, the negative had to
be sent to Sweden to be treated and then blown up to 35 mm, and the
 One Way or Another 341

result was that the lm was not released for a couple of years.6 Some
observers nd it dicult to believe that there wasnt something deliber-
ate in this delay, and that icaic was uncomfortable about the lms
critique of macho values. This could well be true, but it doesnt have to
enter into any explanation of the delay. Cuba is a Latin American coun-
try, and in the experience of the present writer more ecient to lm in
than any other; but people in Cuba still have a quite dierent, less anx-
ious, sense of time to that of the overprogramed metropolis. It does not
require sinister motives to explain how the technical problems alone
that the lm encountered could have taken two years to solve.
Sara Gmez trained as a musician, but after six years at the Havana
Conservatory she decided, she said, that she didnt want to be a middle-
class black woman who played the piano.7 She got a job as a journalist
and then joined icaic as an assistant director, working with Alea,
Fraga, and, on a visit to Cuba, Agns Varda. Then, between 1964 and De
cierta manera in 1974, she made ten documentaries, most of them no
longer than ten minutes duration, on a range of subjects that included
popular culture and traditions, the mechanization of tobacco produc-
tion, music, civic education, trac accidents, child care, prenatal atten-
tion, popular democracy, and labor relations. What emerges is a body of
work largely concerned with the same kinds of theme as her nal lm.
It also demonstrates the acquisition of an exceptional economy of means
in communication.
Ir a Santiago (1964), which takes its title from a poem by Federico
Garca Lorca, is a fond and gentle portrait of Santiago de Cuba and its
people. Its style of shooting (the photography is by Mario Garca Joya),
editing, and informal voice-over commentary make it perhaps the most
striking free cinema documentary ever produced in Cuba. It has a
very personal quality, which is reected in the credits: as in one or two
other lms, Mario Garca Joya is listed under his nickname Mayito, and
the director lists herself as Sarita, the name by which she was known
in icaic. A year later came Excursin a Vuelta Abajo (Trip to Vuelta
Abajo), which describes tobacco culture in a village in the province of
Pinar del Ro and the changes brought about by the Revolution. Curi-
ously, it is more of an apprentice work than the rst lm, but it is
notable for including in the focus of its social observation aspects that
are unusual for the emerging pattern of the Cuban documentaryfor
example, the way it foregrounds the image of women workers in the
 342 One Way or Another

elds, at a time when the subject had not yet drawn the attention of his-
torians. It is true of all of Sara Gmezs lms that she gives a stronger
presence to women and black people than you get with a number of less
conscientious directors within icaic.
Her third lm was Y. . . tenemos sabor, which has already been dis-
cussed, and is one of the most delightful Cuban music documentaries
in a quarter century. Then came a trio of lms on the Isle of Pines,
which the Revolution renamed the Isle of Youth when it decided to turn
it over to youth and education. The last of the three, Isla de Tesoro (Trea-
sure Island, 1969) is a short, poetic, celebratory lm essay, which simply
crosscuts between shots of the Model Penitentiary of the pseudorepub-
lic years, where Fidel was imprisoned by Batista, and the production of
citrus fruit, which ends up being packed and labeled as Treasure Island
Grapefruit Produce of Cuba. The two lms that precede it, En la otra
isla (On the other island, 1967) and Una isla para Miguel (An island for
Miguel, 1968), are among the most extraordinary documentaries by any
Cuban director.
The rst and longer of them (at forty minutes) is a loose collection of
individual portraits of people in the island: a seventeen-year-old girl
who wants to be a hairdresser; a man of the theater who works as a
cowboy during the day and runs a theater group in the evenings;
another agricultural worker who used to be a tenor in Havana; an ex-
seminarian; a girl at the reformatory; the woman at the reformatory re-
sponsible for her. The interviewsand as a result the structure of the
lmhave unusual qualities. Cubans are people who, from the evidence
of Cuban cinema, are always eager to talk to cameras and microphones,
but rarely in the manner we see here. Sara Gmez clearly had a remark-
able way of gaining the trust of her subjects, and drawing out of them
stories and reections that go far beyond most other documentaries.
The tenor, for example, speaks of the experience of racism he had in
Havana as a black singer wanting to sing leading operatic roles. The in-
terview, which is a two-shot of the both of them, sitting very informally
in the open air, ends with him asking his interviewer, Sara, do you think
one day Ill sing Traviata? Other interviews touch further awkward
subjects, above all questions of delinquency and reeducation, and the
diculties of life for children in a reformatory or reeducation camp.
The girl, Manuela, whose father has been imprisoned as a cia agent,
while her mother has gone to the States, describes her own experience,
 One Way or Another 343

and Cacha, her supervisor, answers questions very frankly about the
need to treat inmates as adults, especially in the matter of sexual relations.
This is also one of the handful of Cuban lms that make self-reference
to the camera and the business of lming, along the lines of Garca
Espinosas call in Imperfect Cinema. Clapper boards are seen, the lm
has captions that say what comes next. The most striking moment of
this kind tells us that Cacha, the supervisor, is going to comment on the
interview with Manuela afterwards. The eect is to have us see the sub-
jects in the lm as integral human beings and representatives of partic-
ular social roles at the same time, and in a mutually illuminating way: it
helps the viewer to make a judgment about the dialectic between the
individual and the social. The same is true of Una isla para Miguel,
which, beginning with a hearing before the disciplinary assembly at one
of the reeducation camps, is a case study of the boy being disciplined. It
includes memorable interviews with Miguels motherin their poorest
of homes, she and her countless children abandoned by her husband
and with his best buddy. A supervisor comments dramatically, They
are rebels without a cause, our task is to give them the cause. Although
in our own countries we are nowadays used to television reports that
probe similar topics about reformatories and their inmates, this is some-
what rare footage for Cubawhich is a great pity. These reformatories
are not the same as the umap (Military Units to Aid Production) camps
in the two years 1965 to 1967, which were set up in a wave of sectarian
fervor to rehabilitate those who were deemed social mists: drug users,
Jehovahs Witnesses, hippies, and homosexualspeople thought to be
easy marks for cia activity. What these lms show is very far from the
exploitation of fears inamed by the constant threat of external attack,
but a serious, humane approach to the real problems of socially mar-
ginal individuals. If there had been more lms of this kind, the Revolu-
tion would have been less susceptible to attacks abroad on the grounds
of irrational inhumanity toward social dissidents.
The next two lms deal with public subjects. Poder local, poder popu-
lar (Local power, popular power, 1970) and Un documental a propsito
del trnsito (A documentary about trac, 1971). The rst is political
and expository, and the only lm of hers that is both too long and, in its
structure, unwieldy; the second is a sociological and technical investiga-
tion of the problems of city trac, inevitably somewhat prosaic. The
next two, Atencin pre-natal and Ao Uno (Prenatal attention and First
 344 One Way or Another

year, both 1972, each ten minutes), are most remarkable, from the point
of view of a masculine viewer, for the way they address themselves di-
rectly to women, about preparing to give birth and about lactation dur-
ing the babys rst year of life, ignoring the presence of any chance male
viewer, although they were made for general screening. Sobre horas ex-
tras y trabajo voluntario (On overtime and voluntary work, 1973) ad-
dresses everyone. Also a very short lm, it is politically more eective
than the longer essay on popular power. The theme, of course, needs far
less expositionit goes back to Che Guevara in the 1960s. Together with
Isla de Tesoro the lm of Sara Gmez that is closest in style to Santiago
lvarez, its stance is boldly agitational: there must be a struggle against
the unnecessary use of overtime, but also, at the same time, against
wasteful voluntary work that is not properly organized.
Nearly all her lms, then, wereas imperfect cinema requiresso-
cially and politically functional: we nd that the style and idiom of the
lm are subordinate to its purpose, never the other way around. When-
ever possible, a radical aesthetic is explored, but emerges from within,
so that the lm can be readily grasped and still communicate on a pop-
ular level. Gmezs last work, De cierta manera is nothing if not an aes-
thetically radical lm in this manner. Above all, it mixes dierent modes
of lmic discourse, ction and documentary, in the most original way,
not merely by alternating them but by using real people to play them-
selves alongside professional actors. Moreover, these real people appear
both as themselvesdocumentary material about them tells us who
they areand as characters within the story. None of this is at all forced;
it arises from the familiarity both of Gmez herself and of Cuban audi-
ences, with a whole range of forms in both documentary and ction.
Two things can be said about this. First, it is an answer to the prob-
lem of the battle between the two forms of ction and documentary of
which Garca Espinosa spoke in Montreal. In fact, to nd a way of inte-
grating them was an endeavor of Cuban lmmakers that rst clearly
surfaced in the late 1960s with lms like Memorias del subdesarrollo and
La primera carga al machete. Manuel Octavio Gmez pursued the at-
tempt in Una mujer, un hombre, una ciudad through incorporating his
own documentary material of a few years earlier. There are yet other
examples, such as Manuel Herreras Girn of 1972, which adopts the for-
mat of a wide-screen war movie to present the results of an exhaustive
documentary investigation of the events. The second comment is that
 One Way or Another 345

what De cierta manera achieves is a veritable interpenetration of the

two forms of address, a teasing synthesis, which makes it a prime example
of the process of syncretism. The only problem of the lm as nished is
a miscalculation over the commentary, which imitates the didactic doc-
umentary in its use of a certain kind of formal sociological language. It
is intended, according to Rigoberto Lpez, as an element of distantia-
tion, and, at the same time, to amplify the analysis.8 But, as Julia Lesage
remarks in her perceptive piece on the lm in Jump Cut, it has a ten-
dency to sound pompous and grating.9 (I dont think this is reducible,
however, to insensitivity on the part of Alea and Garca Espinosa in the
course of nishing the lm: the commentary, Alea told me, was what
Sara Gmez herself intendedthough one would like to think that,
had she lived, she might have had second thoughts, at least as far as the
tone of its delivery is concerned.)
Another feminist commentator on the lm, Annette Kuhn, nds that
the way the lm takes up and in various ways combines the two dier-
ent conventions of lm realism undercuts the normal relationship a
viewer has with either on its own. It is a form of deconstruction, she
says, that works by setting up expectations and then cutting them o,
leaving the lm with no single internally consistent discourse.10 I think
this is only partly true. It is demonstrable that while the lm is decon-
structional in the way she describes, its internal discourse is quite con-
sistentit speaks to us from within the quite particular experience of
the Cuban Revolution. For a third commentator, E. Ann Kaplan, the
juxtaposition of two cinematic strategies forces the spectator to become
aware of his/her need for narrative. For as one watches, one becomes
impatient with the documentary sections; one always wants to get back
to the story.11 I think probably this eect is in certain respects less
acute with the Cuban audience, because of its considerable familiarity
with the range of documentary styles that have been discussed in this
book. But it is true, as she says, that the question of the power of narra-
tive lm preoccupies Cuban lmmakers and critics; that this is because
Cuban audiences continue to respond strongly to classical Hollywood
cinema; and that what Sara Gmez is attempting in this lm is to give a
moral lesson in a pleasurable way. The lm in fact is hugely pleasurable,
and zips along (it runs only seventy-two minutes), brimming with
lightness and good humor, however jarring the jumps. On the contrary,
the jar of the jumps becomes part of the pleasure.
 346 One Way or Another

For De cierta manera is a revolutionary love story, which means a

lm about the growing relationship between a man and a woman that
refuses to isolate their elective anity from the social determinants that
have not only made them what they are, but continue to aect them as
they get to know each other. Nor does their relationship follow a smooth
course, but pride and conict interrupt it, the result not of the mysteri-
ous qualities of the irreducible personality but the expression in the in-
dividual of class background, cultural inheritance, and personal history,
refracted through the impact of the Revolution. The central protago-
nists are Mario (played by Mario Balmaceda, who also played Miguel in
Una mujer, un hombre, una ciudad), a worker at a bus factory, and Yolanda
(Yolanda Cueller), a primary-school teacher from a lower middle-class
background.
The setting of the lm is Marios beat. In 1961, in one of the Revolu-
tions rst major projects to tackle the countrys enormous housing prob-
lem, ve new neighborhoods were built for people living in Las Yaguas,
a Havana slum that was one of the worst. The new neighborhoods were
constructed by the same people who were to live in them, who belonged to
the dominantly black lumpen classes. One of these districts is Miraores,
where our two protagonists live and work. For Yolanda, its a confusing
place: How do I feel? she asks in a Godardian testimony to camera.
Well, not very good. I graduated from dierent schools. Then I came
here, and all this was a dierent world, one I thought no longer existed.
All of this we learn early in the lm, amid a sequence of commentary
over documentary images, which begin with a dramatic shot of demoli-
tion that serves as a thematic image for the whole picture. Here and in
subsequent commentaries, the lm develops the thesis that rehousing is
only a start. By itself it can do little to improve the life of people previ-
ously consigned to subsistence in the belts of squalor and poverty that
still surround all other major cities throughout Latin America. With re-
housing must come the provision of employment, education, and health
care. Even these things only make up the groundwork. Revolutionary
change involves cultural regeneration, but this is not an automatic
process. It requires a struggle to overcome the habits, customs, beliefs,
and values of the old society. And in the case of the marginal classes,
without even a tradition of participation in trade-union and political
activity, their hermetic culture contains a high degree of resistance and
 One Way or Another 347

De cierta manera (Sara Gmez, 1974)

inertia toward such changes; hence the persistence of certain antisocial

attitudes within the Revolution.
To focus the problems, the lm investigates the Abacu religious soci-
ety (a phenomenon that has also been examined in a number of Cuban
documentaries on various subjects where the Abacu inuence can be
felt, like music, such as the scar Valds lm La rumba). Mario and
Yolanda are conversing on a hillside, talking about Marios background
and adolescence. He was lucky, he says, to have been conscripted into
the army, because military service saved him at the moment he was think-
ing of going. Leaving the country? asks Yolanda. No, no, what for?
Going means taking the oath.What oath?When I was a kid I wanted
to be a igo. A igo! Yolanda repeats in horror, to which Mario
responds, You think they eat babies on Santa Brbaras Day, right?
and the lm shifts to a documentary sequence on the Abacu to which
the igo belongs. The Abacu is a secret society, a heritage of the reli-
gious practices and beliefs conserved in the legends, rites, symbols, and
language of the slaves. The society took form during the nineteenth
century in the marginal population of the ports of Havana and Matan-
zas, where it not only fullled religious functions but also became a
mutual help association that defended the rights of its members (white
 348 One Way or Another

as well as black). However, as an exclusively male domain, it epitomizes

the social aspirations, norms, and values of male chauvinism in Cuban
society. The sequence that informs us of all this is not merely a conve-
nient way of instructing us about it. It also serves to teach us that Yolandas
horror has elements of social prejudice in it, and that Mario is a man
aware of the need to ght free of its inuence.
Male chauvinism takes its toll in the problems that Yolanda encoun-
ters in her workplace. She is criticized by fellow teachers for her lack of
sympathy in her dealings with La Mejicana, the mother of one of her
pupils, Lzaro, a somewhat delinquent child. La Mejicana and Lzaro
are real people; Lzaro is the eldest of ve children in a fatherless family.
As La Mejicana explains to Yolanda, she had a ght with her husband in
1962 and has not heard from him since. A narration in the lm tells us
that Around 53 percent of the family units in a group of 341 people were
headed by women, a characteristic of marginal families whose marital-
instability indexes are high.
Machismo takes another form where Mario works. In fact, the lm
opensand apart from an epilogue, closeswith a workers assembly
at Marios factory that is called upon to examine the case of a buddy of
Marios, Humberto. Humberto has been missing from workhe skipped
work in order to go and get laid, though only Mario knows this. Hum-
berto tells the assembly that he went to visit his dying mother at the
other end of the island. Humberto is in many ways Marios alter ego.
Dierent aspects of the old marginal culture survive in each of them,
but more rigidly and individualistically in Humberto, for whom the
pursuit of personal whim justies the evasion of social responsibility
toward his fellow workers and dissimulation in the interests of private
gratication. In Marios case, the predominant survival of marginalism
is found in his adherence to the code of loyaltynot giving Humberto
away. But in the assembly, Mario feels provoked by Humbertos behav-
ior and spills the beans, which we witness in the opening sequence and
then nally come to understand at the end when we see it again in con-
text. When this happens, we recognize one of the members of the work-
ers council that presides over the assembly as Marios father, Candito,
whom we know to be a good revolutionary and critical of Humberto
because he has been before the council three times already. And what
we have learned from Candito makes it clear that Mario has exploded
because he is confused by a conict of loyalties, the old code of loyalty to
 One Way or Another 349

his buddy and the new social code of the Revolution and loyalty among
compaeros.
The lm opens and leads back to this explosive moment of rupture,
and the love story is contained within this trajectory. The two strands
stand in opposition to each other: an old friendship and an old code of
behavior is shattered, while a new relationship is formed on the basis of
new codes of behavior, antagonistic to the rst. For his part, Humberto
is clear about this. At one point he tells Mario, The teachers brain-
washed you, made you a Komsomol! Mario, however, remains confused.
In the epilogue, after he has turned against his former buddy, he says, I
acted like a woman, turning him in. Here the lm not only refuses to
idealize its hero but quite the opposite: it wants to be sure we know he
has done the right thing for totally the wrong reasonnot because he
has acted like a woman, but because thats what he tells himself. This
judgment upon him to which the whole course of the lm has brought
us is reinforced by remarks in the epilogue, in the scene in which work-
ers from the assembly discuss what has happened. These are real workers
from the bus factory where the lm was made, and this unscripted dis-
cussion is another index of imperfect cinema in practice, for these are
no longer simply actors in a story, but representatives of the audience
watching the lm, who show the audience what it is to be, as in Cortzars
Por primera vez, at the same time participant observers and observant
participators in the dramas of daily life.
De cierta manera is seen, with great justication, by critics in the me-
tropolis as a feminist lm, but in Cuba the term feminism was not part
of the revolutionary vocabulary because of overtones of antagonistic
confrontation between men and women that were regarded as unwel-
comeperhaps an indication of the degree to which Cuban society re-
mained patriarchal. Mario, in the lm, has not yet escaped the thought
structures of machismo because, although he knows he has been in their
grip and is ghting against them, he can still only imagine that to break
them is to be womanish rather than revolutionary. The struggle for
womens equality in Cuba, the lm is telling us (not womens rights: the
Revolution has given them these already), is a struggle against machismo,
which has to be joined by men and women together, within the Revolu-
tion, because machismo is one of the symptoms of underdevelopment.
We can see this more clearly if we map out the way a whole series of ele-
ments in the lm comprise a surprisingly symmetrical set of structural
 350 One Way or Another

oppositions. First, Humberto and Lzaro are the lms two delinquents;
an absent mother is associated with one, an absent father with the other.
Second, there are conicts between Mario and Humberto, on the one
hand, and Yolanda and Lzaro, on the other. Linked to these two con-
icts is a further pair of antagonisms, between Humberto and Candito,
and between Lzaro and his mother La Mejicana. But since Humberto
is Marios alter ego, what you get symbolically are two conicts between
child and parent, one in Marios sphere, one in Yolandas, making a
square. Within the square are various other parallels, especially between
the factory and the school, as the two central protagonists places of
work, and between the workers assembly in the one, and, in the other,
Yolandas meeting with her fellow teachers:
humberto lazaro
[absent mother] [absent father]
mario yolanda
factory school
workers teachers
assembly meeting
[father] [mother]
candito la mejicana

Certain other features fall within this pattern too, such as relations of
authority: Canditos authority over Humberto, and Yolandas over Lzaro,
arise from their positions within the institutions they belong to, factory
and school, in Canditos case as an elected representative, in Yolandas
because teachers are expected to concern themselves with their pupils
well-being.
These institutional settings are important elements in the sociospatial
discourse of the lmthe way the lm maps the social relationships it
portrays onto the spaces, physical and institutional, in which they occur:
the factory, the school, the street, the home, and other places where the
lm unfolds. Each location corresponds to a dierent kind of social en-
counter, and each kind of social encounter involves a dierent aspect of
a characters social existence, and therefore calls forth dierent behav-
ior. The way the lm handles these dierences and contrasts is manifold
and paradigmatic, exposing the poverty of traditional narrative plotting
that ignores everything about its characters that falls outside the partic-
ular set of motivations concentrated in the conventional plot and its
 One Way or Another 351

linear trajectory. The sociospatial discourse of a conventional narrative

movie, though it always existsactions always take place, every scene has
a settingis subordinate to the designs of the plot, and location is a
coloring rather than part of the lms very fabric. But not here. Just as
Miraores, the district, is almost a character in the lm in its own right,
so too the individual locations contribute their own character to the
dialectic of action and interaction. The narrative system of the lm is
thus a constant movement of many points, not a single unfolding line,
and the character of each protagonist is not a predened entity that can
only change according to the exigencies of the plot, but a living eld of
possibilities arising from the constraints and sanctions of the dierent
social spaces these people inhabit. This is why Sara Gmez is able so
successfully to introduce real persons alongside ctional ones, not as
nonprofessional actors but as themselves, people with their own name
and surname, to borrow a phrase from the neorealist Zavattini.
Only two locations in De cierta manera require special comment be-
cause they carry specic local connotations. The rst is the bedroom
where Mario and Yolanda have been making love, which probably only
a Cuban audience would instantly recognize as a room in one of the
posadas or albergues that the government erected after the Revolution to
alleviate one of the problems of the housing shortage: these are hostels
where couples can hire rooms by the hour. The conversation in this
scene is a function of the fact that the room is neutral territory in which
couples meet as equals, at least to an extent that might not be possible
in their own rooms in an overcrowded house where privacy is elusive.
In the second, the scene acquires a crucial dimension of irony if you
know the locations symbolic connotations. At the end of the lm, when
Mario makes his remark about behaving like a woman, he is talking
with a workmate in a public garden, underneath a statue of General
Maceo. The general sits astride a horse with enormous balls. The irony
arises because to say in Cuba that someone has the balls of Maceos
horse is to say that hes more macho than everyone else. After all, its
men who made the Revolution, says Mario, and the location silently
asks, What kind of boast is that?12
The particular signicance within this scheme of the institutional
settings is twofold. On the one hand, this is where the ethics of the Revo-
lution establish the standards against which other forms of behavior
must be measured. It is as if the lm is an inquiry into the extent to
 352 One Way or Another

which revolutionary ethics have become generalized, entering even the

more informal, more enclosed, less public spaces in which people live
out their private lives, spaces where it is much more dicult to root out
the old values. At the same time, the dierent worlds of factory and
school are contrasted in the lm as the dierent realms of the central
pair, Mario and Yolanda. They seem therefore to represent the two realms
of male and female. The division is a symbolic arrangement that reveals
a pattern of interdependence, fractured moieties that seek completion
in each other, symbolized by the elective anity between Mario and
Yolanda. The diculty, revealed by the parallel conicts in the story, is
that the forms of bonding in which people either nd themselves or en-
gagefamily, friendship, sexual lovecan become either wholesome
or, when social codes conict, antagonistic. In the case of the love bond,
antagonism usually comes less from determinate dierences of class back-
ground, cultural inheritance, and personal history than when one part-
ner refuses to accept the challenge of the other to change. But in the lm
and in Cuban society, the major force for change comes from beyond
either partner: it comes from the dynamics of the Revolution. Margin-
alism, underdevelopment, machismo are forms of disruption inherited
from the past. And if the Revolution can hardly tolerate them, neither
can it accept any solution to the problems they create that only intensi-
es antagonism. No society can be totally free from coercion, but coer-
cion must be tempered by collective responsibility, for otherwise the
Revolution would be denying its own character. It must therefore be
part of the character of revolutionary ethicsand De cierta manera is
above all a lm about revolutionary ethicsthat it recognizes conict
and negation as productive, according to the laws of dialectical logic.
But although this is a perfectly consistent and cogent position, it leaves
open the question of whether the Revolution in reality can live up to
the Revolution as depicted on the screen.
 PA RT I I I
New Generations:
A Cinema of Readjustment
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Reconnecting

Despite the alteration of the political climate in Cuba in the 1970s, the
lessons of the Revolutions rst decade remained vigilant. According to
Ambrosio Fornet, literary historian turned screenwriter:
At the triumph of the Revolution, the rst thing we found was that for
the rst time we had the means of disseminating our culture, that is to
say, we had publishers, a Film Institute, centers of investigationbut the
question was, Now that weve got these resources; what culture shall we
disseminate? What concept of culture, what concept of the relationship
between the writer, the intellectual, and the people? Because we had
been formedthe majority of intellectualsin a tradition that was
based in European and North American culture, which means, in social
terms, in a bourgeois cultural tradition. Few of us were Marxists. So the
rst question we had to pose was, What concept of culture are we going
to defend? We didnt have the answer, it wasnt written anywhere, no
angel descended with it from heaven. We had to nd the answer in prac-
tice, in the revolutionary process itself. Obviously, this produced clashes
and conicts between those who in some way continued defending the
old concept of culture and the position of the intellectual in society, and
those who wanted to defend a new sense and concept of culture. For the
rst time, the people, through the Revolution, had come into close-up,
so to speak, in the scenario of history and were transforming the bases of
society. It seemed impossible to many of us in a situation like this that
the traditional concept of culture should remain untouchable. A large
group of us thought, We cannot simply defend what in Occidental
culture are called the eternal values, because we had discovered that
eternal values didnt exist. Eternal values are historical values, and they
were changing. And obviously, in contact with this changing reality, we
also changed our conceptions.1

355
 356 Reconnecting

If this describes the years in which the cultural politics of the Revolu-
tion were forged, icaic played a leading role throughout this period in
the ideological confrontations through which the new cultural politics
was dened. The Film Institute developed and defended positions more
lucidly than any comparable institution against both the sometimes
near-hysterical attacks of liberals who feared the encroachment of the
state, and the mechanical application of schemes for socialist realism on
the part of more orthodox and traditional Marxists associated with the
old guard of the Communist Party. Defending the right of its members
to experiment in the most varied styles and techniques, icaic argued
that economic criteria of productivity could not be applied to artistic
work, which could not be reduced either to purely didactic functions or
to propaganda. Nor, it said, should the audience be refused the right to
see the work of aesthetically progressive European lmmakers because
they supposedly dealt in the portrayal of bourgeois decadence. Instead
of such communist orthodoxies, icaics lmmakers wanted to under-
mine the adverse powers of the dream screen of commercial entertain-
ment cinema by building on what started as the audiences spontaneous
change of perspective in order to create both a more critical disposition
in the viewer and a radical lm language. The result was a series of
exhilarating, experimental lms by Toms Gutirrez Alea, Julio Garca
Espinosa, Humberto Sols, Manuel Octavio Gmez, Santiago lvarez,
and others in the late 1960s that were recognized on every continent of
the globe as a major new presence in world cinemaa moment it
would prove hard to maintain.
During the 1960s, at a time when lmgoing in countries like the United
States and Britain had begun to fall in the face of the spread of television,
there was huge growth in the Cuban cinema audience, which almost dou-
bled, from just over 54 million admissions in 1962, to almost 100 million
in 1972.2 There were also, in that year, an estimated 25 million mobile
cinema spectators, an audience that didnt exist before 1959. There is no
better general indicator of icaics overall success, unless the fact that
by 1972 nine Cuban feature lms had achieved a spectatorship of more
than one million each. They included three lms by Alea and three by
Garca Espinosa (Table 1). These are huge gures for a country with a
population of around ten million. In Britain, a country ve times the
size, the cinema audience was only slightly higher (119 million in 1978).
 Reconnecting 357

Table 1. Top Cuban lms by admission, 196071 (Cuba)

Admissions
Film Director Year (in millions)
Historias de la Revolucin Toms Gutirrez Alea 1960 1.0
Cuba baila Julio Garca Espinosa 1960 1.2
El joven rebelde Julio Garca Espinosa 1961 1.0
Las doce sillas Toms Gutirrez Alea 1962 1.7
Cuba 58 Jorge Fraga and 1962 1.3
Jos Miguel Garca Ascot
La muerte de una burcrata Toms Gutirrez Alea 1966 1.4
Las aventuras de Juan Julio Garca Espinosa 1967 3.2
Quin Quin
Luca Humberto Sols 1968 1.2
Los das de agua Manuel Octavio Gmez 1971 1.0

The Cuban gures therefore indicate both a high frequency of atten-

dance and the huge social reach of the successful individual lm.
Average attendance in 1972 ran at eleven cinema visits per person, plus
three mobile cinema shows. The usual provisos must be made about
statistics like these: totals and averages do not, for example, indicate the
portion of the total population that formed the cinema-going public,
nor, in the case of popular lms, what proportion of the audience saw
the lm more than once. In the Cuban case, one must add that the two
modes of exhibitiontheaters and mobile cinemascatered to dier-
ent audiences, so the averages for each were actually higher. The signi-
cance of the gures for individual lms is enormous. This size audience
gave the lmmaker a degree of popular reach and cultural inuence
that had never previously been enjoyed by a Cuban artist in any eld
(except perhaps music). If this phenomenon is hardly unique to Cuba,
the special conditions of the Revolution gave it particular force. icaic
represented a public space that, under communism, had expanded, not
contracted, and, as a popular communicator, the Cuban lmmaker en-
joyed a social reach that was not only unprecedented, but probably only
exceeded by Fidel Castro himselfa situation that made icaic the ob-
ject of constant scrutiny by political watchdogs, but also lent the lm-
maker unusual inuence, with the result that Cuban cinema was politi-
 358 Reconnecting

cized through and through. When the Soviet inuence began to prevail,
with the eect of somewhat constraining traditional forms of public
debate, icaic retained its own voice, and became a vicarious surrogate
for a public sphere diminished by ideological orthodoxy and technocratic
dirigisme, balancing its output between armative lms and those that
reserved the right to critically question stereotypes and aporias.
In the 1970s, with the growth of both television and competing live
attractions, the paying cinema audience began to decline, although mo-
bile cinema spectatorship held up. But in 1977, the cinema audience had
fallen to under 59 million. This audience was divided between the same
number of lms in the cinemas: ten or twelve new foreign lms every
month. In terms of its own productions, however, icaic managed to
sustain the popularity that Cuban cinema achieved in its rst ten years,
with another ve lms reaching the same high ratings before the end of
its second decade (Table 2). Three of these lms were representative of
the turn toward the popular genre movie that Garca Espinosa warned
about at the beginning of the 1970s. The fourth, Elpidio Valds, made by
Juan Padrn, was icaics rst full-length animated cartoon, the tale of
a hero of the nineteenth-century wars of liberation against Spain. This
delightful picture is a highly eective demonstration that an animation
factory like Disneys is not a prerequisite of producing a cartoon feature.
Padrn had only a very small team to work withthree key animators
and half a dozen assistantsbut evolved a highly economic graphic
style in a series of short cartoons over several years, pared down to the
simplest elements, and in Elpidio, a character of strong popular appeal
not only to children in Cuba but wherever the lm was seen in Latin
America.
The last of these lms, Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa), a rst
feature by Pastor Vega, with Daisy Granados in the title role and a script
by Ambrosio Fornet, was a piece of raw realism about the breakup of a
marriage, which quickly proved to be icaics most controversial movie
in twenty years. Nevertheless, a number of observers expressed the feel-
ing that Cuban cinema was in process of paying for its capacity to com-
municate to the detriment of its thematic and stylistic audacity. The
English scholar John King would suggest there was a deliberate shift to
capture a more popular audience, which in turn implies a more trans-
parent style.3 According to the German critic Peter Schumann, eorts
directed toward the cinematic literacy that Garca Espinosa dreamed
 Reconnecting 359

Table 2. Top Cuban lms by admission, 197279 (Cuba)

Admissions
Film Director Year (in millions)
El hombre de Maisinic Manuel Prez 1973 1.9
Patty-Candela Rogelio Pars 1976 1.1
El brigadista Octavio Cortzar 1977 1.8
Elpidio Valds Juan Padrn 1979 1.9
Retrato de Teresa Pastor Vega 1979 1.5

of did not bear much fruit, and rather than the pursuit of quality, icaic
sadly preferred to follow the taste of the public, in pursuit of prot-
ability.4 The American Julianne Burton attributed the decline in formal
experimentalism to the inuence of government cultural policy in the
early 1970s, with its emphasis on mass participation, youth, and ideo-
logical conformity.5 In short, the 1970s tested icaics viability in di-
cult economic circumstances and a changing political reality.
At the start of its second decade, the internal problems that mainly
exercised icaic centered on questions of praxis in the change from the
euphoria of the heroic years, which incorporated the guerrilla mentality
of cine militante, to the industrial structure of production within the
communist state. As Garca Espinosa reminded his listeners in 1974, We
dont, as intellectuals and artists, achieve proletarian consciousness sim-
ply by going along to factories and union meetings, lming the life and
conditions of the workers, necessary as all these things are, unless our
consciousness is subjected to the same determinants as those workers,
and that means, through the experience of our own labor process.6
This may sound like theoretical rhetoric, but the nature of the labor
process and the relations of production were a subject of active discussion
and even experiment within icaic, and ways of working were modied
in response to collective discussion about the best interpretation of the
socialist principles of productive relations. The abolition of capitalist
relations of production, through the amalgamation into one enterprise
of what are otherwise separate companies buying and selling each others
services, favored the streamlining of the production process. A particularly
productive example was the creation of a special eects department that
brought the processes of rostrum camera animation together with those
of the optical camera that is conventionally attached to the laboratory.
 360 Reconnecting

This reorganization answered to economic necessity, since without it it

would not have been possible to accomplish the necessary amount of
workbut neither would the stylistic evolution of newsreel and docu-
mentary pioneered by Santiago lvarez, with its integration of com-
bined eects, have been possible otherwise.
In applying the procedures of works meetings and workers councils
(paralleled, of course, by the meetings of the Institutes party commit-
tee), icaic developed working methods that fostered a constant shar-
ing of experience with real aesthetic benets, because each production
department felt supported and they consequently all worked well to-
gether. When the lmmakers went out to lm this type of works meet-
ing in other places, especially Sara Gmez in De cierta manera and Alea
in Hasta cierto punto, they did so not like lm crews shooting an indus-
trial dispute in a liberal democracy, as foreigners to the scenes they were
lming, but rather as participant observers in a social process that they
shared with their subjects.
Another instance of streamlined practice concerns the role of music
and the composer. On the one hand, with the creation of the Grupo
Sonora Experimental at the end of the 1960s, and the reintegration of
the composer with the performing group, icaic actively encouraged
musical innovation. At the same time, the composer became more inte-
grated into the editing process than happens in standard Hollywood
practice, where the music for a lm is not usually composed until the
editing is almost complete, and a special music editor, working in the
cutting room, prepares a music cue sheet for the composer with appro-
priate timings and visual cues. At icaic, there were no special music edi-
tors. Composers prepared cue sheets for themselves. But this is a great
advantage from an aesthetic point of view, a blow against the segmenta-
tion of creative input. The composer who works through the lm with
the director and editor in the cutting room can develop a more organic
approach to the music.
The same practice of debate brought directors and creative personnel
together for internal screenings of lms not only by icaic itself but
also by Latin American comrades. Visiting lmmakers who participated
in these screenings spoke of an intense and critical dialogue among
equals.7 According to Garca Espinosa, recalling the period thirty years
laterwhen these debates no longer happenedthe form they took was
the sign and guarantee of icaics health: the two main strands among
 Reconnecting 361

the Institutes members, the Marxists and the libertarian, confronted

each other, argued their piece, and learned to respect the others posi-
tions. What emerged was a collective wisdom that avoided the extremes
of both, and thrived on stylistic diversity.
On the screen, icaic succeeded in creating an identity for itself that
reected its encouragement of diversity. icaic as the institutional author
of its lms is the opposite of the commercial studios as the corporate
authors of theirs. In Cuban cinemas there is neither a censorship certi-
cate nor the announcement of the distribution company, no lions or
gongs or globes. The institute has not even employed a xed logo or trade-
mark as producer or distributor, and signs on with icaic presents
wherever the lmmaker decides to put it, and in whatever graphic form,
which thus varies with every lm. It presents itself, in other words, not as
the entity that merchandises the lm, or that classies it, but as an
author among the authors. At the same time, with the growing use of pre-
title sequences, the opening scenes of a Cuban lm often become a way
of reasserting the primacy of the image over the signs of its authorship.

Not all the lms that were made in the rst decade were released. One
reason is that in creating the space for the lmmakers to learn on the
job, some of the lms that went into production failed to run the course
and were aborted. Countries with established lm industries often rely
on a combination of apprenticeship and lm schools to develop new
lmmakers, yet lm industries all over the world still end up with dis-
asters on their hands. This is no more than a consequence of the inher-
ent risks of the medium, of the costliness of lm production and the
need to cut your losses when necessary. There can be no surprise if the
same thing happened in icaic, where the urgency of the cultural needs
of the Revolution made taking risks the only possible artistic policy. Ac-
cusations were made of censorship and autocracy, but in the early years
it would sometimes have been both artistically and politically counter-
productive to continue spending money on completing lms that too
clearly displayed their apprentice nature. It is not surprising if, as weve
seen, some of those involved would quit icaic and Cuba.
Even after the departures of the 1960s it remained inevitable that con-
ict would sooner or later arise, if not within icaic itself, then between
icaic and those fractions within the party incapable of distinguishing
between art and propaganda. If this would sometimes make icaic cau-
 362 Reconnecting

tious, then the problem intensied in the gray years of the 1970s, when
the country turned in on itself and the party line was hardened. How-
ever, although this process suggests the Sovietization of the Cuban
political system, it would be tendentious to describe it as Stalinism. The
severity of the sanctions against the recalcitrant individual in Cuba hardly
compared with the extremities of Stalins, or even post-Stalinist rule;
and in aesthetic matters, notions of socialist realism mostly remained
anathema, and in icaic were followed only by a small minority. If there
were heavy pressures toward political orthodoxy and compliance, the
core of the problem was the persistence of a narrow and dogmatic
paternalism within powerful sections of the ruling echelons. In the
blinkered view of the party orthodox, the mass media, cinema included,
were only to be seen as a means of supporting and strengthening the
ecacy of social control. But from an artistic point of view, which was
the position that icaic defended, this authoritarianism is not just mis-
taken but also precarious, because the medium itself has a contrary
emancipatory potentialthe emancipation of the imagination from all
forms of mechanical, sclerotic, and sectarian thinking. icaic was there-
fore cast in the role of internal critic from the left.
In this situation, icaics own antisectarianism was its strength. It
welcomed independent-minded artists and intellectualsthe musicians
in the Grupo Sonora Experimental, gures like the writer Jess Daz
and gave them the benet of sharing a collective identity based on the
combination of political engagement and artistic freedom. It was a
point of principle that political engagement provided the grounds for
the expressive richness of the artistic endeavor, but, as Jorge Fraga would
tell a group of visitors from Britain, icaic was a collective with no norm
to determine the way that the collective and the individuals within it
were interlinked. Fraga himself began his career as a television camera-
man, joined icaic in its founding year, began directing documentaries
in 1960, and became head of production in 1978. The consensus view, he
said, was that artistic creativity was a personal process within a collective
one. Directors know they have to look for ideas which will be cheap to
do, and this is their responsibility, their share of the common problems.
Ideas are progressed by discussion, because when you just cut away
the nal results you risk becoming a censor, but if you work in the
process from the start youre more constructive, youre part of it, trying
to stimulate and seek solutions.8
 Reconnecting 363

If this is a dierence that the unsympathetic observer quickly dismisses

with the objection that if it isnt censorship, then its self-censorship, it
must be said that in the Cuban context, self-censorship was a volatile
aair with its own special character, a game more than a regime. Accord-
ing to Fornet, referring to Fidels formula of 1961, The fact is that, in
the context of a state of siege, aesthetic discourse, perhaps because of its
own polysemic nature, delights in the license of this inside where every-
thingor almost everythingis permitted. Nor are the limits ever
xed, because the everything permitted is not a permanent right but
an arena of conict that must be renegotiated every day, with no quar-
ter granted to the bureaucracy and with the temptation of irresponsible
whimsy rmly resisted.9 In short, if some found the daily struggle too
much and abandoned Cuba, there were others whose work was inter-
rupted or held back who did not. Humberto Sols, for example, did not
react this way over Un da de noviembre, nor did Manuel Octavio Gmez,
when he was obliged to put aside the documentary he was shooting in
Nuevitas, which he later incorporated into Una mujer, un hombre, una
ciudad. On the contrary, both would nd other ways of addressing the
issues that concerned them. And the same is true for Sara Gmez, when
she had to abandon a projected trilogy of documentaries that touched
on the excesses of machismo and the persistence of racism, topics con-
sidered potentially divisive not only by the ideologically orthodox.
What these cases suggest is not a regime of inexible orthodoxy but a
space where the limits were not infrequently put to the test. For the lm-
makers who did the testing, the problem was less a matter of Stalinist
tendencies, real or imagined, than of the contradictions revealed in the
Revolutions unfolding project of modernization, especially in the social
domain, where great advances had been made but many traditional
prejudices remained resistant to change. Ocially, for example, machismo
and racism belonged to the colonial and underdeveloped past, and the
Revolution had condemned and reversed them: racism was gone for-
ever, and as for machismo, it was on the way out. In reality, conscious-
ness lagged behind. Women and blacks enjoyed real advances in legal
rights, employment, education, and health care, yet active traces of pa-
triarchy and prejudice persisted, obstinately contradicting the ocial
ideology. Moreover, within icaic itself, black and women directors re-
mained underrepresented (and the death of Sara Gmez deprived icaic
of one of its three black directors of the 1970s). According to one com-
 364 Reconnecting

mentator, writing at the end of the 1980s, it is ironic that of the four
great Cuban lms about womens emancipation, three were made by
menLuca (1968), Retrato de Teresa (1979), and Hasta cierto punto
(1983)while the fourth, De cierta manera by Sara Gmez, was com-
pleted by men after her untimely death. This, says Jean Stubbs, reects
the state of the struggle within the lm industry, where, despite sub-
stantial numbers of women working in production, the only women
directors were in documentary and newsreel.10 Despite signicant ex-
ceptions, the dominant perspective on the Cuban screen thus remained
masculine, even when it wasnt machista. At the same time, however,
Cuban cinema provided a space for a small number of extraordinary
actresses to create a series of strong female personae with few parallels
elsewhere in Latin America (at least before the emergence of feminist
directors like Mara Luisa Bemberg in Argentina)in particular Idalia
Anreus, Daisy Granados, and Mirta Ibarra. There is doubtless a certain
signicance in the fact that all three were married to the directors of the
lms in which they created many of their screen characters.
In racial terms, meanwhile, Cuban cinema was neither black nor white,
but is better described as creole, a native category in which the Hispanic
and African traits in Cuban culture are conjoined. Many members of
icaic held to a position that disavowed any real dierence between
Cuban and Afro-Cuban culture, on the grounds that the former is al-
ready imbued with the latter, an attitude that goes back to the modernists
of the 1920s and that nds expression not only in music, an eminently
syncretistic medium in which the two inuences inect each other at
every turn, but also in painters from Wilfredo Lam to Manuel Mendive.
According to this view, black Cubans do not represent a distinct and
separate cultural unity any more than whites; rather, authentic Cuban
culture is infused with the African legacy. Moreover, the artistic imagi-
nation was also a way of transcending the color of the artists skin. As
the black director Sergio Giral attested in 1991, One things been proven
in Cuba, which is that not only blacks are capable of dealing with black
themes, not only women can deal with the theme of women, and today
the theme of gays is being dealt with by people who are not gay.11 In
this spirit, many aspects of Afro-Cuban culture readily found their way
onto the screen, not only in a wealth of documentaries on cultural
themes like music and dance, but also in a steady stream of feature lms
foregrounding the black experience, from Jorge Fragas La odisea de
 Reconnecting 365

General Jos in 1968 to Sergio Girals slave trilogy in the 1970s, with
Aleas La ltima cena and Cecilia by Humberto Sols at the end of the
decadelms made, except for Giral, by white directors, though the
writers were sometimes black, as of course were the actors. The growing
treatment of black thematics brought a much greater diversity of racial
representation to the Cuban screen in the 1960s and 1970s than could be
found at that time in European and Anglo-Saxon countries, and the
emergence of black actors, like Miguel Benavides and Samuel Claxton,
of great strength and dignity. On the other hand, unless the lm explic-
itly concerned a black thematic, few principal roles were allotted to black
actors, and whiteness remained the paradigm of the handsome and the
beautiful, especially in the feminine domain.
It goes without saying that this is not what it feels like on the streets.
Cuba is a more multiracial society than most, and in between those of
pure descent, either Hispanic or African, is a large mulatto population,
of mixed racial descentfrom Chinese to Jewishwhich creates a highly
diverse range of features. This variety becomes a constant presence in
Cuban cinema as the background of actuality in which the principals,
not all of whom display dominant Hispanic features anyway, are generally
seen. The vivid presence of this actuality in Cuban lms works against
the old dualistic cinematic codes, and actors like Idalia Anreus, Daysi
Granados, Jos Rodrguez, and Luis Alberto Garca display a chameleon-
like capacity, often aided by the cinematography, to become more black
or more Hispanic in their gestures and looks according to the charac-
ters needs.
However, there was a catch in the unfolding political process. On the
one hand, black people came to be widely seen, by themselves and others,
as special beneciaries of the new social order, to which they have mainly
awarded unconditional loyalty. At the same time, racial prejudice was
ocially considered a negative legacy of the past. On the other hand,
social attitudes are subject to uneven development and blackness was
still identied by many people (of dierent ethnicities) with negative
stereotypes, such as antisocial behavior and lack of family values and
morality.12 But because these were understood as vestiges of history,
anyone who took a more critical view was in a potential double bind,
since to foreground such problems was seen as unsettling to political
consensus and unity.
This double bind was not limited to racial issues, but applied to any
 366 Reconnecting

kind of problem that suggested socialand therefore politicalweak-

ness under siege. The ruling maxim became hablar de nuestras con-
tradicciones es darle armas al enemigo (to talk of our contradictions is
to oer arms to the enemy). There were certain topics, then, that by gen-
eral consensus it was better not to touch on directly, for fear of provok-
ing conict. According to the director Juan Carlos Tabo, the artist in
Cuba became subject to a debate that was both internal and external,
and provided the meat for both censorship and self-censorship;13 or, as
Sergio Giral put it, You exercise a form of self-censorship in not want-
ing to destroy the cake by sticking your ngers in it too much, espe-
cially if you felt a sense of political and social responsibility and wanted
what you did to serve the revolutionary process.14 The more orthodox
Fraga explained the problem bluntly: there are certain aims that in order
to achieve them, the best thing to do is not make a public debate about
it. There are other means.15
The danger in this kind of political climate, whether inside icaic or
beyond, is that a wedge is driven between two types of language, the
public and the private, political rhetoric and colloquial speech. In the
latter, the former is impugned, especially through humor and irony, and
dubbed with the slang term teque. If this linguistic split is manifest
throughout civil society, it also has special consequences for artistic dis-
course, with its polysemic vocation, and perhaps for cinema in particu-
lar, a medium in which colloquial forms of speech are part of the fabric
of the narrative, and teque becomes particularly alienating. But there
were also lmmakers in Cuba who believed that cinema is precisely a
medium where these publicly hidden topics can be brought into view. It
is no accident that these directors were not much associated with the
genre option, where representation becomes stylized, stereotyped, and
loses its edge, but with the ideas of imperfect cinema.
However, it is not as if imperfect cinema ever became a doctrine or
an orthodoxy, and icaics feature output in the 1970s includes lms of
several dierent trends. Fornet has identied three fundamental ten-
dencies.16 The rst he describes as the exploration of the limits of a
quotidian dramaturgy with a strong charge of social critique; it is found
in Ustedes tienen la palabra by Manuel Octavio Gmez (1973), and De
cierta manera by Sara Gmez (1974); signicantly, both were lmed on
16 mm to permit a more spontaneous visual style. Manuel Octavio Gmez
will visit this terrain again with Una mujer, un hombre, una ciudad in
 Reconnecting 367

1977, and Pastor Vega, with his controversial Retrato de Teresa in 1979.
Yet the truth is that this was not a strong current in Cuban ction cin-
ema of the 1970s, and the absence of contemporary subjects was con-
spicuous. It is not simply a product of the dogmatism of the ve gray
years that began the decade, however, since the absence of the contem-
porary is more marked in the second half of the 1970s. In any case, the
Cuban critics Caballero and del Ro maintain that icaic was not di-
rectly aected by the conformism of the time because lms take a long
time to make. (On the other hand, they also pass through three distinct
stages of productionscripting, shooting, and editingwhich permit
major modications to be made along the way; this entails the risks of
censorship but also allows creative responses to political changes.) The
question cannot therefore simply be put down to an inimical political
climate, but indicates the problematic nature of contemporary reality
on other, more existential levels, the diculty in the new circumstances
of nding the right kind of form for the treatment of the contemporary
subjectin other words a problem as much aesthetic as political, be-
cause the two have become inseparable. Only one thing was certain:
formulas dont work very well.
The second tendency is the elaboration of new forms of historical re-
covery, exemplied by Girals El otro Francisco, and including a lm by
Humberto Sols from 1975, Cantata de Chile, as well as Mella by Enrique
Pineda Barnet the following year. Sometimes these lms retain the ap-
proach of imperfect cinema, but not always; the historical drama has a
liability to pull in a dierent direction, toward cinema as spectacle, which
Sols in particular takes up the challenge to tame in the epic Cecilia of
1981, a lm fated, as we shall see, to provoke a crisis in icaic.
Furthest from imperfect cinema, the third tendency was the recourse
to traditional genres, initially with the double aim of using their proven
ecacy of communication and transforming them from inside (though
it is questionable how far the latter was achieved). Here the rst exem-
plars, both in 1973, are El extrao caso de Rachel K. by scar Valds, and
especially El hombre de Maisinic by Manuel Prez. Ideologically safer,
with a populist aesthetic, it is this which becomes the strongest tendency
in the second half of the 1970s, with Patty-Candela by Rogelio Pars in
1976; Octavio Cortzars El brigadista and Ro Negro by Manuel Prez in
1977; Enrique Pineda Barnets Aquella larga noche and Manuel Herreras
No hay sabado sin sol in 1979lms that demonstrate a high level of
 368 Reconnecting

competence in conventional narrative cinema (though the last two less

so), but little to stretch the viewers critical faculties.
These three tendencies are not hermetic categories, however, and sev-
eral lms cut across and combine them. Giral followed the deconstruc-
tionist El otro Francisco with conventional narrative treatments of the
slavery theme in Rancheador and Maluala; Alea applies a linear narrative
to the same theme but with very dierent eect in La ltima cena, which
can hardly be considered a genre movie in the narrow sense (unless the
genre is the historical allegory, which implies no particular narrative
mode). All four lms address the recovery of the history of slavery, oer-
ing allegories of national identity that addressed the present indirectly,
by reexamining the historical legacy that perhaps more than any other
was responsible for shaping both Cuban society and the Cuban character.
The most baroque piece of experimental cinema of the 1970s was un-
doubtedly Cantata de Chile, a lm of impeccable revolutionary credentials
and highly unconventional form, a poetic and musical tapestry (the
music is by Leo Brouwer) that brings together cine solidaridad, cine
rescate, and cine militante. The narrative form of the lm goes back to
Griths Intolerance, here interweaving four episodes in Chilean history
(the Araucanian struggle against the Spanish colonizers; the nineteenth-
century independence struggle; the strike of Iquique in 1907, which
ended in a massacre; and the contemporary opposition to Pinochet) to
become what Fornet calls a synchronic treatment of history, the coex-
istence of dierent times in the same geographical space, and which he
considers a notable innovation in the narrative structures of Cuban cin-
ema.17 Others took a dierent view, like Jorge Fraga, who found it very
militant, but also very rhetorical, adding that in Cuba it was a complete
failure.18
Two other lms fall outside the general pattern: La tierra y el cielo
(Heaven and earth) by Manuel Octavio Gmez, dating from 1976, and
Aleas Los sobrevivientes (The survivors) of 1978. The former, made with
the Haitian community in Cuba, is the story of two young cane cutters
of Haitian origin and followers of voodoo who join the rebels in the
Sierra Maestra, in a plot that stages a confrontation between the human
world of revolutionary struggle and the magical world of saint worship,
a practice that in the Cuban form of Santera was still the subject of
ocial disapproval. The latter is a Buuelesque comedy of the absurd,
which traces the degeneration of an upper-class Cuban family who lock
 Reconnecting 369

themselves in their mansion when the Cuban Revolution comes to power,

to sit out the bad times and preserve their class values, but who then
proceed to regress from capitalism back to the condition of savagery.
Neither is among the directors strongest lms.

Some commentators see the whole of the 1970s as a colorless time; for
others, the gray years come to an end after the middle of the decade
with the stage known as the institutionalization of the revolution, a
political process that began with the rst Communist Party congress in
1975 and the proclamation of a new one-party constitution a year later,
followed before the year was out by the rst elections in sixteen years.
The powers of local government were now exercised by directly elected
municipal assemblies; the delegates to these assemblies elected deputies
to the National Assembly, which elected the members of the Council of
State, whose presidentFidel Castrowas (and is) both head of state
and head of government. Since delegates and deputiesgenerally party-
approvedhold regular jobs, and the National Assembly meets only
twice a year, political hegemony remained in the hands of the party
apparatus. On the other hand, the new system aimed for a partial de-
centralization of the management of services and local activities that
successfully devolved responsibility for local aairs to the level where
they matter most closely, and this initially encouraged popular partici-
pation. (Direct elections to the National Assembly would be introduced
fteen years later, when the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe
threatened political instability at home.) This decentralization had par-
ticular implications for the Film Institute. It meant that the manage-
ment of the cinemas now came under the aegis of local government
except for a few showcase movie theaters owned by icaicwhich
rented its lms from icaics distribution arm.
The process of institutional reform reached the cultural sector in 1976,
with the creation of the Ministry of Culture under Armando Hart, who,
as minister of education at the beginning of the Revolution, had over-
seen the literacy campaign. Hart was a sympathetic cultural commissar,
with a sympathetic view of cultural issues informed by a reading of
Gramsci. Replacing the limited functions of the National Council for
Culture (Consejo Nacional de Cultura), the new ministry divided the
cultural infrastructure of the country into ve vice ministries: music
and spectacles; theater and dance; books; plastic arts and design; and
 370 Reconnecting

lmthereby incorporating icaic, under the continuing direction of

Alfredo Guevara, who now became a vice minister. (Meanwhile, Julio
Garca Espinosa became vice minister for music and spectacles; the ex-
perimental lm Son o no son, which he shot in 1978, was a direct result
of this involvement.) Absent from the cultural domain, however, were
radio and television, which, like the press, answered to the central com-
mittee through supervision by the partys ideological oce. The result
was a split between cinema and television with both cultural and ideo-
logical consequences. Fraga told his British visitors, We dont have a
relationship with [television] . . . in our opinion they have a very rigid
mentality with a very popularistic approach to things and a tendency to
standardise.19 In theory, intercourse between the two domains was not
impossible, but in practice there was little movement between them, by
either directors and technicians or even actors; the separation under-
lined the tight control exercised over broadcasting as against the respect
accorded to artistic values in the cinema. The problem would only be-
come problematic for icaic at the beginning of the 1990s, when a merger
was threatened. But if the members of icaic tended to enjoy the sense
of privilege and distinction that this division sustained, then given their
well-developed senses of irony and conscientiousness, neither did they
refrainfollowing Aleas lead in Hasta cierto punto of 1983from sat-
irizing themselves for it.
If icaic suered a symbolic loss of autonomy when it was brought
under the culture ministry, the new arrangements had no immediate
eect on the types of lms that were made. In literary and intellectual
spheres, on the other hand, the new climate brought welcome relief,
asaccording to one accountthe unspoken blacklisting of certain
authors was dropped and publications began to open up to more con-
troversial gures and writing.20 There were other implications for icaic,
however, that began to work themselves out behind the scenes. In the
economic reforms that accompanied the institutionalization process,
which aimed at linking wage increases to increased productivity, the
Revolution was staging a partial retreat from the idealistic voluntarism
associated with Che Guevara, in the hope that this would succeed in
improving the eciency and protability of economic enterprise. icaic,
of course, suered many of the same problems that could be found in
other sectors of productionlimited nancial and technical resources,
a demand that exceeded production capacitiesas well as problems
 Reconnecting 371

like a lack of wherewithal to develop new talent to which artistic enter-

prises are specially prone. The new salary system bought in at the end of
the 1970s, in accordance with national policy, and after due internal dis-
cussion, lumbered it with unnecessary complications: icaic had never
measured success by protability. The new system required that wages
be adjusted by means of bonuses, linked to the productivity of the
enterprise and dierentiated according to sector. icaic introduced incen-
tives aimed to encourage directors and crews to get lms made within
the time and budget allotted to them, with bonuses awarded by a com-
mittee of peers for high-quality results. The theory was that people were
rewarded for making lms more quickly, more cheaply, and more e-
ciently, but without penalizing artistic quality. It was an awkward bal-
ancing act.
At the same time, in line with a general trend throughout the econ-
omy, the organization of the Institute grew progressively more complex.
Before 1975, it was run by a central committee directly overseeing four
departments (studios and labor; technical processes; nances; and artis-
tic programming, which included production). By the early 1980s, it
had been reorganized into three enterprises, each comprising a number
of departments. The core of icaic was devoted to production and pro-
duction services. A separate oce was devoted to exhibition and associ-
ated activities (difusin), divided into the Cinemateca and rst-run
theaters; the national distribution operation; international operations;
and a press and information center. A third section consisted in provin-
cial service units for maintaining the cinemas up and down the coun-
try.21 With astute programming and a small number of highly successful
lms of its own, and leaving aside the necessary dollar expenditure on
lm stock and the like, icaic managed to keep its head above water,
with average annual prots of around half a million pesosa modest
but signicant gure. On the other hand, it suered a problematic im-
balance. While the feature movie continued to be regarded as the para-
digm of cinema and the pinnacle of the directors art, ction produc-
tion remained low. According to gures given by Fornet for the rst
thirty years, average annual production during the 1970s amounted to 35
documentaries (including some feature-length), 52 newsreels, 7 ani-
mated cartoons, and only 3 featuresthe same as in the 1960s. Jorge
Fraga gave similar gures to the British visitors in 1983: this year we
made 43 short documentaries, which for a country like us is OK. The
 372 Reconnecting

aim is do one a week, and more are not needed unless they are for TV
or some other use, but for the cinema circuit, 52 . . . is the maximum.
But we want to do not less than one feature a month, and if we could,
and if there were the demand, we would do one a week.22 This, of
course, was a pipe dream, a level of productivity quite beyond their
means in an economic situation in which icaic could barely aord to
strike enough prints for national distribution. The intention was for all
new Cuban lms to be shown for two weeks on the main circuit in
Havana and the provinces, but there are fourteen of these in the country,
and icaic could aord no more than six or eight prints, so country-
wide release was staggered. In 1975, when Julio Garca Espinosa criticized
the aristocratic attitude of those who disparaged commercial cinema
and spoke of the need for a more quotidian form of dramaturgy that
connected more strongly with popular experience, he was also thinking,
says Fornet, of how to increase productivity.23

The year 1979 saw ve feature lms released. Manuel Herrera (who made
the remarkable Girn) attempted a contemporary social comedy with
No hay sbado sin sol (No Saturday without sun), the story of a young
woman community worker faced with intransigence among peasant
families who are supposed to be moving to new housing in the nearby
town. For Aquella larga noche (That long night), Enrique Pineda Barnet
returned to the 1950s, with a story of two women in the urban under-
ground who were caught and tortured. Ironically, it suers from the
problem of evoking the lms of revolutionary heroism of the early
1960s while not being a genre movie in the mold of Patty-Candela or
Ro Negro. Rather dierent was Prisioneros desaparecidos (Disappeared
prisoners), a drama of solidarity with the victims of Pinochets Chile,
and directed by the exiled Chilean director Sergio Castilla, of special in-
terest as one of the rst of a wave of coproductions that icaic under-
took during the 1980s with a range of Latin American directors (and
with coproducers in both Latin America and Europe).
The two lms that topped the box oce in 1979 appealed to dierent
audiences. Where Elpidio Valds was a childrens animation lm, Retrato
de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa) was made for their parents. A lm about
the breakdown of a marriage, it triggered huge public response, which
was taken up across the mass media throughout the country. According
to Julianne Burton, there were weeks of heated debate in newspapers
 Reconnecting 373

and magazines, on radio, television and streetcorners. Half the adult

population of Havana, where the lm was set, had seen the movie within
the rst six weeks of its release, and, apparently, few viewers declined
to take sides in the confrontation between sacred family tradition and
womens need for self-realization.24 Teresa, played with extraordinary
conviction by Daisy Granados, struggles against the intransigence of
her machista husband. A television repairman with a roving eye, Ramn
is played by Adolfo Llaurad, repeating the role of the uncomprehend-
ing husband in the third part of Luca, to which Teresa, as Burton re-
marks, can thus be read as a sequel, a further stage in the struggle of the
Cuban woman to acquire autonomy. Teresa leads not a double but a
triple life: housewife and mother of three young children, with a day
job in a textile factory, she is also union cultural secretary and the main
mover behind the factorys amateur dance groupit is the time this
takes up that is the initial bone of marital contention. When the group is
selected for a national competition, the pressures mount, Ramn threatens
to leave, and she ends up throwing him out. As the lmmaker Mayra
Vilass recalled, The polemic embraced the broadest sectors of society.
The equalities of the Cuban woman became a theme of public discus-
sion, outside the home. Teresa, as a worker, found a very important
interlocutor, a fundamental element of our society, the working-class
woman. From one day to the next, Teresa became the image of the Cuban
woman, typifying her conicts.25
If Cuban audiences were shocked to see Teresa physically ghting o
Ramn, and if many of them cheered her on when she called him to ac-
count, their response was nourished by the lms representational qual-
ity, the stylistic objectivity of its new wave neorealism, and what the
German critic Peter Schumann aptly calls the precision with which it
describes the typical situation of the Cuban woman.26 Pastor Vega spoke
in an interview of his admiration for both Robert Flahertys and the
Italian neorealists ability to reveal drama in the simple observation of
daily life, in the spirit of which he sets up a linear narrative, lmed with
a controlled camera, free of subjective shots and cinematic tricks.27 The
narrative moves back and forth between Teresas life and Ramns,
counterposing the wide range of social spaces through which they vari-
ously movethe Havana outdoors of the lms opening, the factory, the
home, the rehearsal hall, the TV repair workshop, the homes Ramn
visits on the job, streets, bars, and restaurantsto become, in Burtons
 374 Reconnecting

phrase, a dynamic assembly of scenes and events in which the nominal

subject is not always present, or, if present, is not always the primary
focus.28 Everywhere the lm is full of detailed social observation. Not
least, it oers almost casually, as Burton puts it, a very studied cross
section of kinds and classes of Cuban housing and family structure: the
modest but cheerful bungalows of Teresa and Ramns neighborhood,
the modern high rise apartment blocks of Alamar, the elegant colonial
patio of Teresas mothers house, the decrepit shack of an inhospitable
black man, the plush appointments and generous proportions of the
nineteenth-century mansion where Ramns girlfriend lives with her
parents. An idea of the nuclear family prevails, but various versions of
the extended family are also in evidence. And when Teresa throws
Ramn out, he moves back in with his mother.
The lms rootedness in the immediate social reality is all the more
gritty for the direct sound track and the eschewal of background music,
except for a couple of highly romanticized scenesabove all, the family
outing to the park, which paints an idyllic portrait of the family life
that is threatened by parental disaccord. But these moments so imbue
the lm that, according to Burton, Retrato de Teresa not only leaves be-
hind the kind of experiments in deconstruction of cinematic form that
prevailed in Cuban cinema until the mid-1970s, but also evokes the
allure of the perfect cinema of Hollywood-style production values and
sunset-bathed television commercials.29 What is true is that the camera
has abandoned the agitated and nervous visual style, and the editing
has relinquished the jerky, fast, almost syncopated cutting that charac-
terized the eervescent cinema of the late 1960s. In this sense, Burton is
perhaps correct when she calls Retrato de Teresa a turning point in Cuban
cinema, a lm that exemplied the generic and stylistic shifts that would
characterize Cuban lmmaking in the subsequent decade, although there
is inevitably a certain degree of generalization in such a judgment.30
In the daytime scenes, Livio Delgados light and airy cinematography
is full of bright sun and pastel colors. Much of the lm is shot in long
takes, with the camera on a tripod and subtle use of the zoom; the dance
rehearsals are lmed with a handheld camera, but far more controlled
than is common practice in Cuban documentary of the same period.
With equal propriety, the camera captures Teresas early-morning rou-
tinenaturally, she is the rst to get upas she prepares her childrens
 Reconnecting 375

milk in the still-dark kitchen, wakes her husband, gets the children
dressed, and makes breakfast, in a stark sequence that seems to echo the
work of feminist lmmakers like Chantal Akerman (though Burton her-
self mentions Robert Bentons Kramer vs. Kramer of the same year) in
which, unalleviated by subjectivizing close-ups, the long takes and sta-
tionary camera placement accentuate the tedium of her kitchen tasks.31
The cool, observational documentary quality of the camera is maintained
when the couple come to blows, the camera retaining its distance, al-
lowing us always to see them both fully in frame, and who is doing what
to whom. Again, as Burton sums up, The lms objectivity and even
realism of tone are never violated in the interest of communicating a
more subjective kind of experience. . . . It is not that the heroine is elusive
but that the lmmaker, in keeping with his quest for a documentary-
style vision, chooses an unmitigatedly externalized mode of portrayal,
preferring to expend more energy on social interaction than on inner
being.32
Vega described the lms intentions in good ideological terms: The
enemy of Teresa and Ramn is the assembly of traditions engendered
by the family structure of the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie
which still survives in the depths of consciousness and which holds
back the emergence and development of emotions and feelings of greater
depth, richness, and value. Teresa struggles to stop being a wife and be-
come a compaera. In this context, however, the lm targets television
as a site of false ideological reassurance, counterposing the real lifeworld
with that of the TV setwhich is symbolized in its oer of schlocky and
inauthentic popular music (home-grown or imported) in place of the
Afro-Cuban rhythms of Teresas dance group. Not for nothing have the
lmmakers given Ramn the job of a TV repairman, and not just be-
cause (as Burton points out) his work gives him entre to peoples
homes, thus allowing the viewer signicant glimpses of other domestic
arrangements. The lm sets television up as a source of distraction, fan-
tasy, and the projection of a mendacious image of society. Early in the
lm (as Burton mentions), Teresa arrives home from a late rehearsal to
nd two women neighbors watching a melodrama on the TV, while
Ramn sulks in the bedroom. In a later scene, Ramn, waiting for pay-
ment, is forced to watch with a mesmerized customer while an actress
in early-nineteenth-century frills gushes over her erring lovers sagacity
 376 Reconnecting

in winning her forgiveness by oering her a rose, a gesture Ramn will

later repeat only to discover that what works on television fails to do so
in real life.
Ramn is good at his jobjust as hes a good fatherbut in what is
possibly the most arresting moment in the lm, the image he xes so
well takes its revenge, and television betrays him. On the night Teresas
dance group wins the competition and she and the groups choreogra-
pher Toms are interviewed on television, Ramn is found playing domi-
noes at the neighborhood guard post. The TV set is malfunctioning and
he gets asked to x it just as the unctuous interviewer (played by the
vintage Cuban TV presenter Germn Pinelli) turns to Teresa uttering
piropos and joking about what a ne couple she and Toms would make.
For the rst time in the lm, Ramn watches the television he xes, as
the presenter oers his wife an orchid and a kiss on the hand, asks Teresa
her husbands name, and turns to camera to pronounce Ramn, con
permiso (With your permission, Ramn). If Ramn, as he silently turns
away, is deated, the viewers sympathy for him is ambivalent and double-
edged, thrown into relief by the disclosure of TVs own falsity of sub-
stance and tone.
Burton ends up feeling that the lm strikes a potentially subversive
chord against the dominant ideology of Cuban sexual politics, but re-
mains within the problematic of la pareja, the (heterosexual) couple.
She nds a telling disparity in the lms treatment of its protagonist
and her husband, for it presents more details of Ramns life than of
Teresas. In particular, we witness the inception, development, and de-
cline of his extramarital aair, whereas Teresas possible intimacy with
Toms remains an enigma. For Burton this is evidence of a certain ide-
ological limitation in the lms attitude toward its subject, an ellipsis
that replicates the social attitude the lm purportedly criticizes, that
extra-marital sexual intimacy is tolerable, even encouraged, for men but
inconceivable for women.33 The issue is not academic since the denoue-
ment of the lm hangs on the question. In Burtons own account,

In their culminating exchange, which begins in a cafeteria and ends,

pointedly, in front of a bridal shop, Teresa claims the right to be as un-
forgiving of his indelity as he would be of hers. She has to ask three
times what he would do if the tables were turned; from his obtuse point
of view, she seems to be positing the inconceivable. Echoing the dual
morality espoused earlier by Teresas cousin, her mother, and his own,
 Reconnecting 377

Ramn insists, Its not the same. Teresa repeats his phrase, transform-
ing it into a question, before turning on her heel and walking out of the
cafeteria. Increasingly alarmed as the import of her suggestion begins
to dawn on him, Ramn chases her down the street and, in front of
mannequins in wedding gowns, demands, Tell me the truth! What have
you done, Teresa? In one nal repetition, she reminds him rmly before
she disappears into the crowd, Remember, its not the same.

However, the ambiguity of this denouement brilliantly and deliberately

plays on the susceptibilities of the audience. As Vega explained, If wed
made it denite that shed had an aair, Cuban viewers would simply
have said that she deserved what she got. . . . And we wanted people to
hear all of what Teresa says, not just what she says about sex.34 It certainly
seems, from the lms success, that it was the right aesthetic calculation
to make.

The competition in Retrato de Teresa that is won by Teresas group has

the purpose of nding a troupe of acionados to perform at the World
Youth Festival, which was held in Cuba in 1978. It was partly the experi-
ence that icaic gained in organizing screenings as part of the Youth
Festival that decided it to launch an annual lm festival of its own, and
Pastor Vega, on completing Retrato de Teresa, took up a new job as its
rst director. The International Festival of the New Latin American Cin-
ema, rst held in December 1979, rapidly became the principal event of
the Latin American lm calendar, drawing to Havana every December
the crop of the continents directors, producers, critics, young tyros,
and aspirants. Since the trip was for many of them not an easy one, due
to Cubas continuing isolation, their presence was a gesture of political as
well as cultural acknowledgment toward Cuba, which was fully in keep-
ing with the politics of the lm movement to which they all belonged.
With symbolic aplomb, the rst Havana festival opened with the rst
showing of the rst newsreel by the new Nicaraguan Film Institute, the
creation of the Sandinista revolution six months earlier, which came
out of the laboratories in Havana only a few days before the festival.
Those in Latin America who didnt wish to display this kind of com-
mitment to radical politics and a radical cinema didnt go to Havana,
which kept away the commercial operators in the big lm industries of
Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, even when the success of the festival be-
gan to draw contingents of prominent Hollywood names like Francis
 378 Reconnecting

Ford Coppola, Harry Belafonte, Jack Lemmon, and Robert De Niro

but then coming to Havana was a political statement for them too, which
identied them as left liberals and suggested that not everybody in Holly-
wood supported Washingtons blockade of the island.
The Havana Film Festival exemplied from the start the wider signif-
icance of cinema in sustaining the Cuban public sphere. As Retrato de
Teresa fully conrmed, lm in Cuba was a powerful medium capable of
stimulating public debate around important issues, through which peo-
ple were drawn into dialogue and spoke to the political leaders. This
was a reection not only of the lms immense popularity but also of
icaics role in focusing public attention. The Film Institute served as a
model of a Gramscian kind for the organic integration of the intellec-
tual into public creative endeavor, both socially useful and aesthetically
legitimate, and attracted practically the whole artistic and intellectual
community like moths to light (while television repelled them). The
lm festival turned this position to account rst of all simply by taking
place. A rupture in Cubas isolation, bringing old friends and new to
Havana on a regular basis, and sending out powerful signals of life, it
represented a public opening up toward the outside world that served
as an example beyond the sphere of cinema itself.
In the process, if the Havana festival gave the term nuevo cine latino-
americano ocial status, the festival brought Cuban cinema back into
the fold where it belonged. From this perspective, its antecedents go back
to the rst meetings of Latin American lmmakers organized by a lm
club in Via del Mar in Chile in 1967 and 1969. According to Vega, since
there were already strong and coherent signs of activity in Argentina, in
Bolivia, in Brazil, in Cuba and other places, which were not connected,
didnt know each other, hadnt seen each others lms, didnt know each
others theoretical positions or what they were investigating, when they
met in Via, it all took o. There were similar meetings in Venezuela,
in Mrida at the University of the Andes, in 1968, Caracas in 1974, Mrida
again in 1977, when the Committee of Latin American Film Makers was
set upsmall meetings which kept the coherence and communication
of the movement alive, but a festival was needed, a structure to allow
people to meet, to see each others works, reect, discuss.35
Indeed, it was overdue. By the late 1970s, the disparate eorts of lm-
makers in dierent countries amounted to a diverse movement with an
impressive record and its own polemics and positions. Critical maga-
 Reconnecting 379

zines had appeared in several countries in which the lmmakers them-

selves were the leading contributors to a debate about the values and
uses of the lm medium in which the political imperative was central.
Some of the earliest initiatives occurred in out-of-the-way places like
Cuzco in Peru, where a lm club was set up in 1955 and Manuel Chambi
and others started making short documentaries on ethnographic and
sociocultural themesthe French lm historian Sadoul called them the
Cuzco School; they were not unique. The 1950s saw the spread of lm
societies throughout the continent, the proliferation of lmmaking
courses and contests, and the publication of magazines. It was in the
pages of such publications as Hablemos de cine in Peru and Cine al da in
Venezuela that the movement debated its values and sense of identity.
Our cinema, said the Committee of Latin American Film Makers
in 1977, is clandestine or semi-clandestine when circumstances and
repression require it to be. Our cinema is alternative to the cinemas
controlled by the transnationals and their local agents when its political
content or the particular conditions of a country demand it.36 Theo-
retical grounding for this location was provided eight years earlier by
the Argentinian lmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in a
manifesto titled Towards a Third Cinema. Just as Garca Espinosa in Cuba
had based his call for an imperfect cinema on his experience making
lms, Solanas and Getino took their analysis from the experience of
making a mammoth three-part political documentary titled La hora de
los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces). The title is a phrase from Mart
quoted by Che Guevara in the famous speech where he called for more
Vietnams: It is the hour of the furnaces, all that need be seen is their
light.37 Constrained by the conditions of military rule after the coup of
1966, but bolstered by the growth of organized resistance, the lm was
shot clandestinely in conjunction with cadres of the Peronist move-
ment. As one account puts it, it was made in the interstices of the system
and against the system . . . independent in production, militant in poli-
tics, and experimental in language.38
Third cinema was thus conceived as a cinema of liberation whose
moving force is to be found in the Third World countries (though not
exclusively sothe lms of the student movements in Paris, London,
and North America, they said, were also examples of third cinema).39
It is a dening moment within the cultural domain of the emergence
of a new global geography, a postcolonial imperative that began at the
 380 Reconnecting

Bandung Conference of 1955, the founding conference of the Non-Aligned

Movement, where China promulgated the theory of the three worlds, a
historical process that is the political converse of the economic global-
ization of multinational capitalism. First and second cinema correspond,
however, not to the rst and second worlds (the capitalist countries of
the Western bloc, the socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union), but consti-
tute a virtual geography of their own. First cinema is the model imposed
by the American lm industry, the Hollywood movie, wherever it is
foundLos Angeles, Mexico City, or Bombay; second cinema Solanas
and Getino identify with auteur cinema, which in turn is not just a
European phenomenon, but is also found in places like Buenos Aires.
Second cinema is politically reformist but incapable of achieving any
profound change. It is especially impotent in the face of the kind of re-
pression unleashed by neofascist forces like the Latin American mili-
tary. The only alternative, they said, is a third cinema, lms the system
cannot assimilate, which directly and explicitly set out to ght the sys-
tem.40 In this context, of course, Cuba represented a special casethe
only Latin American country where third cinema was not an opposi-
tional principle but the order of the day. But then it was also the only
lmically free territory in Latin America, where cinema was not domi-
nated and controlled by the Hollywood majors and their lackeys.
Brazilian Cinema Novo and a new generation of directors emerging
in Mexico both questioned the formulas of the established industries in
those countries, while the new cinema also took root in several others
where state support for the rst time created conditions for limited levels
of production, like Venezuela. Chile, at the beginning of the 1970s, was
another critical site for the new lm movement, where militant lm-
makers operated in parallel within the system and at its edges. Here,
lmmakers came together during the 1960s to support the coalition of
left-wing parties known as Popular Unity. The years leading up to the
electoral victory of Salvador Allende in 1970 saw a new wave in both c-
tion and documentary. The lm essays of the experimentalists of the
1950s turned into a cinema of urgency, which combined political cam-
paign lms with innovation in lmic technique and language to denounce
the marginalism inherent in underdevelopment. The same spirit fed a
crop of features that appeared in the late 1960s such as Tres tristes tigres
by Ral Ruiz, Valparaso mi amor by Aldo Francia (the moving spirit
 Reconnecting 381

behind the festival in Via del Mar in 1967), and Miguel Littins El chacal
de Nahueltoro.
The attempts of a hard-strapped socialist government to place this
activity on a more secure footing were cut short by the military coup of
1973. The most extraordinary lm to emerge from the latter part of this
period is probably Patricio Guzmns three-part documentary La batalla
de Chile (The Battle of Chile), a record of the months leading up to the
coup. A fertile mixture of direct cinema observation and investigative
reportage, the footage was smuggled out immediately after Allendes
fall and eventually edited in Cuba at icaic. The result is a poignant
work of historical testimony almost unique in the annals of cinema.
Cuban cinema also gained the presence, among others, of the actor Nel-
son Villagra and the lm editor Pedro Chaskel. The Chileans, supported
by a strong international solidarity movement, became the leading prac-
titioners of a cinema of exile that grew up in the 1970s on the margins
and in the interstices of the world lm industry (according to one count,
they made 176 lms in the ten years 197383, fty-six of them features),
which contributed a new genre to the history of world cinema as direc-
tors like Ruiz took the experience of exile as their subject matter, turn-
ing out a series of remarkable expositions of the struggle to understand
the exiles misplaced identity. In 1982, Miguel Littin, director of El chacal
de Nahueltoro and head of Chile Films under Allende, would contribute
a coproduction between Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Costa Rica, Alsino
y el cndor, the rst feature lm to be shot in Nicaragua.
Imperfect cinema, third cinemathese are not the same as nuevo
cine latinoamericano taken as a whole, but specic instances and na-
tional variants of the political vanguard of a broad movement. Indeed,
the diversity of independent Latin American cinema was growing. Jorge
Sanjins in Bolivia took the road of indigenist cinema, while in Venezuela,
Romn Chalbaud evolved new politically edged forms of old Latin
American genres. They and others achieved top box-oce ratings in
their own countries, outgrossing all but the biggest Hollywood hits, and
sometimes even those. Only U.S. monopolization of international distri-
bution prevented their reaching a wider international audience. Never-
theless, by the time icaic launched the Havana Film Festival in 1979, it
seemed at last as if a critical, national, popular cinema was more than a
dream in several countries.
 382 Reconnecting

From this perspective, if Havana became the projection of a cultural

geography in the very process of inventing itself, at the same time it
also had a very practical dimension, which answered to the problems
icaic had to face as a distributor, both at home and abroad. In the
early 1980s, Cuban lms, the big successes included, were only 3 percent
of national screenings. icaic brought in 140 foreign lms a year. Some
35 percent came from the countries of Eastern Europe. In Western Europe,
icaic faced diculties, because, as Fraga explained, many European
producers, being indirectly controlled by American companies, refrained
from selling to it. Sometimes we have to wait for up to ve years until
the rights come back to the producer and then we can buy them. The
other problem is that sometimes it takes two years to buy a lm, be-
cause no one is interested in selling for a thousand dollars; it takes time
to persuade people to sell for this price. These were supplemented by a
smattering of lms from countries like Japan, and ten or twelve new
American lms each year, which were always popular, and slipped in
already subtitled through means no one would ever disclose, rumored
to be a back door in Spain.41 The biggest problem was how to widen ac-
cess to worthwhile Spanish-language lms from Latin America. An agree-
ment with Mexico (the only Latin American country never to break o
relations with Cuba) allowed one Cuban lm into Mexico for every
three Mexican lms shown in Cuba; even then, the Cuban lms shown
in Mexico only got small-scale distribution. The Havana Film Festival
was therefore conceived as an oensive, which combined competition
screenings, press conferences, seminars, and musical performances by
the leading bands of the day, with an international distributors market,
though only of modest proportions. This, over the years, would continue
to be the most dicult part of the festivals work.
The rst Havana Film Festival conrmed the aesthetic diversity that
tempered the unied politics of the gathering. The top ction prize
was shared by the Brazilian director Geraldo Sarno, for Coronel Delmiro
Gouvea, and the Cuban Sergio Giral, for Maluala. Both lms are his-
torical reconstructions, the former a sober and closely observed study
of an episode of the early years of the century in which an enlightened
businessman gets in the way of the local oligarchy and ends up assassi-
nated. The latter, by contrast, adopts a lyrical approach to enter the
rather less well documented historical territory of escaped slaves and the
palenque, opting for the slow-motioning of brutal and bloody violence
 Reconnecting 383

in what some might think the inappropriate style of Sam Peckinpah.

Meanwhile, the top documentary prize went to Guzmns Batalla de
Chile, edging out the Mexican Paul Leducs ABC del etnocidio: Notas sobre
Mesquital, and the Colombian Ciro Durns Gamin, both of them also
extraordinary lms in a vintage year for Latin American documentary.
The lm by Leduc, an A to Z of indictments against the modernizing
state, conrmed its director as the foremost experimental lmmaker in
Mexico, while Gamin explores the world of the Bogot street urchin in a
provocative and interventionist version of direct cinema in which the
lmmaker does not shrink back from lming the children apparently
committing street robberies, although shooting was by arrangement
with the police.42

As for Cuban cinema, from now on it would be judged in the direct and
often highly challenging light of lms coming from all over Latin Amer-
ica, and icaic won no ction prize for the next two years, only regain-
ing the top prize at the fth festival in 1983 with Toms Gutirrez Aleas
Hasta cierto punto. The Cuban documentary, meanwhile, not only held
its own, but brought forward new talents, as a new generation of lm-
makers, who made their rst short documentaries in the mid-1970s, ac-
quired full command of their talents. Paradoxically, the most politicized
screen space in the whole of Latin America encouraged an art of docu-
mentary that sometimes took an apolitical, and frequently humorous,
form. It was, said some, a sign of maturity in the lm culture succored
by the Institute that young directors should treat the cinema as a poetic
medium that encouraged the expression of the directors personal vi-
sion. To consider a small but characteristic selection, the results can be
seen in lms like Madera (Wood, 1980) by Daniel Daz Torres, a highly
lyrical and brilliantly edited ten-minute study of an important natural
resource and its uses, imbued with a gentle sense of humor and empha-
sizing the human values of the craftworkers care for the product. Humor
was even more in evidence in Fernando Prezs 4000 nios (4,000 chil-
dren, 1980), whichagain without commentaryportrays four months
of preparations for a huge gymnastic display on International Chil-
drens Day. Any description of this lm, with its shots of wet patches left
on the oor by impatient four-year-olds, can only make it sound twee;
the trick is in its accomplished execution. But humor was also turned
on social issues such as machismo. A ten-minute lm in 1978 by Luis
 384 Reconnecting

Felipe Bernaza, El piropo, took a well-aimed swipe at the common habit

of Cuban men of throwing compliments at women on the streethere
the women answer back. In 1981, Rolando Daz came up with a brilliant
musical satire called Controversia (Controversy, 1981), again a mere ten
minutes, whose title refers to both subject and forma controversia
being a traditional type of Cuban song in which two singers improvise
an argument, which here becomes a comic dialogue between a male
and a female singer about the battle of the sexes, appropriately set in the
countryside among peasants on a collective farm. Bernaza meanwhile
pursued another of the characteristic thematic spaces of documentary
art for which the maturity of Cuban cinema provided more room than
in its earlier, more urgent days, that of oral history. Cayita: Leyenda y
Gesta (Cayita: The Legend and the Face, 1980) is an exemplary thirty-
minute testimonial by the ninety-six-year-old teacher Cayita Arajo,
who devoted her life to the popular struggle, and here touchingly re-
counts various anecdotes of the islands history from Mart to Castro.
The start of the 1980s saw a hike in the level of documentary produc-
tion, from 35 in 1979, to 56 in 1980, and 50 in 1981, falling back to 41 in
1982, but still covering a wide thematic range. While subject to a certain
political caution, these lms generally showed a form of stylization that
responded to the restrictions of lming on 35 mm for cinema release,
and with the very low shooting ratios that were all that icaic could
aord. As a result, most directors generally steered clear of the more
investigative modes of documentary that elsewhere had developed apace
during the 1970s, usually shooting for television on 16 mm with direct
sound, while the newsreel, where investigation was high on the agenda,
was limited in scope by its one-reel length, and a mode of address that
allowed a degree of artistic license but under the jurisdiction of a suit-
able commentary. The documentarist Melchor Casals, who entered icaic
in the mid-1960s and began directing in 1972, took a dierent approach
in Historia de una descarga (Story of an unloading, 1981, with a com-
mentary by Ambrosio Fornet), a thirty-minute reportage on ine-
ciency in the port of Cienfuegos that would not have been out of place
in a current-aairs slot on television in Britain or the United States, but
that is unusual to nd in the cinema, probably anywhere. In a surpris-
ingly frank interview for the time, Casals described the forms of self-
censorship that came to operate in the Cuban documentary.43 Shooting
a series of lms on the sugar industry in the province of Las Tunas, de-
 Reconnecting 385

lighted by the access he had obtained to a remote part of the island, he

got to the end of the third in the series and realized that because I had
been backed by the Party and the provincial ocials, I was lming in a
way that was not objective and true to reality, so he changed his ap-
proach for the fourth in the series. Cumplimiento (Fulllment) criticized
a factory that fullled its production quotas only by working straight
through the rainy season, thus using up more fuel, producing more break-
downs in equipment, and failing to turn out the best-quality sugar. The
people criticized in the lm were unhappy, but it met with the approval
of the Sugar Ministry, which asked for it to be shown at sugar mills
across the country; it also taught Casals how to maneuver politically. I
knew people in the newsreel division who had been making lms that
were critical of certain enterprises, such as factories, and they couldnt
get those lms shown because the ocials of these places would pre-
vent it. I dont know what right these people had to prohibit the lms
being shown, but they did. When a speech by a member of the polit-
buro gave him the idea for a lm about problems in the ports, he knew
that in order to shoot what was happening he needed high-level sup-
port, and obtained it from a member of the party secretariat before
starting. The lm tracks a mysterious shipment of paper pulp that no
one seems to want or needit has arrived at the wrong port, there isnt
the right equipment to unload it, a forklift truck is produced but its too
big to enter the door of the warehouse, the cargo will have to be left in
the open exposed to the elementsto become an ironic and comic
expos of bureaucratic bungling and indierence. In oering a concrete
representation of an instance of what ocial discourse usually describes
as domestic problems, by giving it a local habitation and a name
and doing so without falling back on rhetoric to make its pointthis is
a lm that does more than simply bring a problem to public attention;
here the mode of reportage creates a space in which the viewer ceases to
be the passive recipient of ideological exhortation, but is invited by this
tale of woe to consider their own relation to the structures of authority
implicated in these events.
A comparable eect can be found in each of two feature-length doc-
umentaries, by the writer Jess Daz, 55 hermanos (55 brothers and sis-
ters) in 1978, and two years later, En tierra de Sandino (In the land of
Sandino), both shot on 16 mm using the techniques of direct cinema,
and with the same cameraman, Adriano Moreno. The rst of these follows
 386 Reconnecting

a brigade of sons and daughters of Cuban exiles returning to their coun-

try for the rst time, on a highly charged three-week trip that ends with
a meeting between the brigade and Fidel. A lm originally intended as a
twenty-minute reportage, it grew to feature length because the situation
created its own demands and determined its own scope, and icaic was
organized in a way that was capable of recognizing and responding
when this happened. According to Daz, the lm constituted a process
of mutual discovery by the lmmakers, on the one hand, and the mem-
bers of the brigade, on the other. The brigadistas, said Daz, had a great
needthey even say so in the lmto be recognized as Cubans. Well,
then, how to be recognized if not rstly by communicating? They had a
restless need to speak about Cuba, economics, politics, history, litera-
ture, cinema, and we were convertedlike everyone else they came in
touch withinto their interlocutors, and this produced a sense of com-
munication, a friendship, a real brother-and-sisterliness. A lm made
under these conditions is obviously going to be exceptional, and it shows.
It conveys a sense of energy that, as Daz says, takes it beyond just a cer-
tain way of working, a certain skill, or a certain kind of manipulation.44
En tierra de Sandino applied the lessons learned to the complexities
of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, by going in search of what
Daz called situations: events, or better, processes, that occur in front
of the camera but create their own dynamic, developing and unfolding
in unforseeable ways. According to Dizs own account, they arrived
fourteen days after the fall of Somoza and immediately started shooting
what was going on in the streets, the rejoicing, the speeches, the danc-
ing. After fteen days I realized that if I continued to work in this way I
would make a pretty lm, and that was not what I wanted to do. Actu-
ally, I was more sure of the lm I didnt want to make.45 For almost the
next four weeks, he went around everywhere he could looking for inci-
dents and clashes to lm, but inevitably got there too late, or the cam-
era upset the participants. He nally struck lucky when he heard about
a coee plantation where the owner was refusing to pay his workers.
The rst day they arrived, the owner wasnt there; posing as a crew from
a television station in Panama, they lmed an interview with the fore-
man and started trying to get the condence of the workers, to whom
they admitted that they were Cubans, hoping that there wasnt an in-
former among them. When the owner came back the next day, both he
and his wife turned out to be far from camera shy, with extraordinary
 Reconnecting 387

results. The end result is a lm made up of just three sections, each of

which consists of a situation of a dierent kind; this is not a three-act
structure but a triangulation of the Nicaraguan revolution itself. Each
section is a more or less self-contained narrative unit not unlike the
movements of a symphony or sonata, which presents its own themes,
textures, and rhythms, but related to the others through an underlying
structural logic. The lms jubilant opening movement portrays a reli-
gious esta in the town of Masaya, lasting from morning to night, which
takes on a political dimension with the ag of the Sandinista National
Liberation Front sharing the honors with the banner of the towns
patron saint. The last, the most reective, is a record of the experience
of a Cuban woman teacher in a countryside village. Between them, the
most extended and extraordinary are the events at the coee plantation,
a situation with an internal dynamic that gives it the feeling of having
been scripted, though it clearly wasnt, in which the camera was evi-
dently the catalyst, but did little except lm as judiciously as possible
what began to unfold. It is only under special conditions, says Daz,
that an owner will talk to his workers and the workers will make de-
mands for the rst time in their lives. It is an extraordinary moment in
history. In being able to lm such a situation, it is rare that the people
who are lming will have the condence of both sides. It is also a strange
moment because . . . which side will defeat the other has not yet been
decided.46 What emerges, as the workers grow in self-condence and
articulacy, and the foreman, the owner, and his wife become more rued
and nally cornered, is a head-on collision in which, with the authority
of the revolution behind them and the camera as their witness, the un-
derprivileged become aware for the rst time of their own strength.

In 1980, Octavio Cortzar, the director of the highly successful El brigadista

of 1977, came out with Guardafronteras (Border guards), a revolution-
ary genre movie set in 1963, in which a squadron of young soldiers is
sent to defend a cay o the coast of Las Villas, at the northern tip of the
island. The scriptwriter, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, admitted that the in-
tention of this immensely popular lmwhich outstripped El brigadista
at the box ocewas perfectly straightforward: to contribute to the
patriotic-military education of the youth.47 The critic Carlos Galiano,
who considers the script too predictable, attributed its success as a youth
movie to various factors: a lot of action and a simple linear narrative,
 388 Reconnecting

delivered by cinematography that pleasingly exploits the natural scen-

ery of the location, and above all a young cast combining familiar faces
from El brigadista with others who owed their popularity to the tele-
vision program Para bailar.48 This, he thought, made it not just a youth
movie but a lm belonging to the youth, but that is the kindest thing he
says about it. It was certainly not the type of thing that foreign visitors
to the Havana Film Festival, or the international jury, were looking to see.
Had icaic indeed lost its sense of direction? In place of a search for
new forms of expression, says Peter Schumann, icaic had established a
craft routine of well-made confectionery for the masses. Alfredo Gue-
vara, he suggests, tried to overcome this situation by undertaking a his-
torical superproduction aimed at the international market and costing
the whole years production budget. But Humberto Sols, who had
made lm history with Luca, was unable to repeat the success, and the
failure of Cecilia would become Alfredo Guevaras nemesis. Schumann,
however, is rather too summary in his judgment that This new drama
on emancipation was unconvincing, it was too conventional and un-
folded too slowly, without the fantasy of the same directors earlier
lms.49 The truth is that no Cuban lm ever prodded a raw nerve more
insistently than this one, revealing in the process the dangers of inter-
fering with certain types of cultural icon; for where Giral based the rst
lm of his trilogy on an abolitionist novel that was now little read, and
proceeded in a didactic fashion to deconstruct the confusions and con-
tradictions of its well-meaning ideology, Sols took the best known of
nineteenth-century Cuban novels, Cirilo Villaverdes Cecilia Valds, and
gave a revered classic a free adaptation that disconcerted both tradi-
tionalists and the popular audience. In the words of the Cuban critics
Rufo Caballero and Joel del Ro, writing a retrospective essay on Cuban
cinema in 1995 under the title No Adult Cinema without Systematic
Heresy, Cecilia, criticized for disrespect, xation, and mannerism, im-
plied a split in Cuban cinema, not only on account of its treatment of
characters enveloped in myth, but also for raising questions about the
artistic means of assuming the historical and the literary.50 Signi-
cantly, the title of this extremely important essay refers back to a piece
by Alfredo Guevara, No es fcil la hereja (Heresy isnt easy), dating
from 1963, which argues passionately the artists right to their own under-
standing, with all the risks that this entails.
 Reconnecting 389

Even with such low levels of feature production icaic had sustained
a number of thematic trends in its output, and Cecilia was the latest in
the line of historical recovery pursued during the 1970s in Girals slave
trilogy and La ltima cena by Alea. We are in the Havana of the 1830s, a
culture of believers arraigned between two religious systems, Catholi-
cism and Santera, the latter inhabited by African deities, the orishas,
disguised as Catholic saints. The colonial capital is a social melting pot
with a sizable population of freed slavesmany of them, like the char-
acter of Pimienta, making a living as musiciansand a growing criollo
class of mixed extraction, whose economic progress and political de-
signs are in process of challenging the hegemony of an aristocratic
white population with strong ties to its Spanish forebears; Pimienta, as
well as being Cecilias spurned black lover, is a political conspirator.
Cecilia, a beautiful and ambitious mulatta, falls prey to the attentions of
the foppish and nihilistic Leonardo, heir to a slavers fortune. Leonardos
mother disapproves of the liaison, and goes about arranging his mar-
riage to Isabel, an heiress in her own right, but a modernizer and an
abolitionist. The English, Isabel tells Leonardo, have come out against
the slave tradethey want to sell machinery to the Caribbean instead.
What are you? asks Leonardo in response to the lecture, a woman or
a book? I am a book, she replies, but with many pages forbidden by
the pope. Pimienta is trying to hide an aged maroon; Cecilia persuades
Leonardo to give the man refuge in return for her becoming Leonardos
mistress, only to be tormented by jealousy when she hears of his be-
trothal to Isabel, who in turn is tormented by nightmares of a slave
revolt at the plantation. When an informer warns Leonardos mother
that her son is harboring a runaway, she turns informer herself, de-
nouncing the old mans whereabouts in exchange for her sons immunity,
with the aim of saving him and his marriage while getting rid of Cecilia.
Authority can be persuaded to protect its own children but the conspir-
ators are not so easy to deal with. Under cover of festivities for Epiphany,
Pimienta, believing Leonardo himself to have been the informer, dons
the costume of the warlike Shang and breaks into the cathedral where
the wedding is taking place to exact his vengeance.
If this is a Cecilia Valds seen through a prism that turns the white
perspective of the classic novel inside out, there are dierent ways such
an approach might be accomplished. Giral created an imaginary vision
 390 Reconnecting

of the same history three dierent ways: rst, through deconstruction

in El otro Francisco, then using the outward form of a western in Ran-
cheador, and lastly, in Maluala, by inserting the black subject into a real-
ist historical drama. Alea, in La ltima cena, proposed an allegorical ver-
sion of the same imaginary in the parody of a religious morality play,
evoking both Brecht and Buuel. In Cecilia, Sols presents a world in
which historical materialism is crossed with psychoanalysis, and where
economic determination meets a collective unconscious with its own
interpretation of the historical world in terms of elemental human forces,
in a reading that enables him to transform one kind of melodrama into
another. The tone is set by a long and extraordinary opening sequence,
reminiscent of the scene in Los das de agua by Manuel Octavio Gmez
where two religious processions, one Catholic, one Yoruba, meet and
fuse, only here there is no fusion, but an extended musical battle played
out on the sound track. An old black woman recounts to her grand-
daughter a Cuban version of the legend of Oshn, goddess of love, who
is sold as a slave in Africa and transformed into a beautiful mulatta in
Cuba. In the view of Paolo Antonio Paranagua, the whole lm is imbued
with Santera and animism, and it is Sols himself who has placed the
myths of Oshn and Shang at the center of this version of a novel pre-
viously regarded as a classic piece of costumbrista (costume) literature.51
In Solss version, the narrative is permeated by the dualism of Cecilia-
Oshn and Pimienta-Shang, which shifts the balance between the char-
acters and subverts the conventional reading.
The eects are peculiarly problematic for an audience for whom
these are not just characters in a novel but have lives beyond the page,
as idealized projections of national character types. Cecilia Valds is not
only a novel but also a zarzuela and a ballet. As Reynaldo Gonzlez puts
it, she became a myth unto herself, a literary gure who came to epito-
mize the Cuban feminine in a form often far removed from the anecdote
in the novel but rooted in historical reality.52 Indeed, Villaverde gave
literary shape to an already-existing myth in the social world of his
time: Cecilia is the mulata blanconazathe mulatta woman who is able
to pass for whiteand the queen of the pardos y morenos (mulattos and
blacks) of her neighborhood, possessed of a special beauty and viva-
ciousness supposedly born of her racial mix, whose feminine charm,
being her only tool for social improvement, thereby condemns her to
serve as a carnal attraction to rich, young white men. She is, of course,
 Reconnecting 391

doubly positioned, an object of sexist manipulation and of racial preju-

dice. A femme fatale lacking the virtues that society required of its
wives, her social career traverses the stages of the irtatious, desire, pas-
sion, and jealousy, but she never escapes the condition of discrimina-
tion. In short, as the personication of Cuban feminine beauty, she rep-
resents, on the one hand, a tacit acknowledgment by all social classes of
the blackness in Cuban blood, and, on the other, a gure of tragedy.
Sols gives his Cecilia a knowing character that provoked unease, and
the lm was criticized for casting the no longer young Daisy Granados
as Cecilia when the part called for a bewitching actress in her late teens
or early twenties.
The eect on the gure of Leonardo is also crucial: in another element
Sols has brought into his reading of the novel, Leonardo is caught up
in an oedipal relationship with his mother that, in spite of the stylish
acting of the Spanish actor Imanol Arias, constituted a particularly prob-
lematic redrawing of the character, by turning Leonardo from a regular
macho into something like one of those pathological heroes whose emer-
gence in the modern dramatic narrative was described, as Fredric Jameson
reminds us, by Georg Lukcs at the beginning of the century. It is as if
Sols has confronted a potent cultural icon with its own recalcitrance
by stripping the hero of his Romantic aura and reinserting him into
the modern world, a move that provoked great anxiety in those attached
to the original gure. Caballero and del Ro, who consider it a lm dis-
tinguished by unusual aesthetic skill and daring, regard its appearance
as a decisive moment in the interrelation between Cuban cinema, criti-
cism, the public, and the cultural apparatus of the state, in which ques-
tions were asked at every level of society about the liberties and licence
that, according to its detractors, the lm took with myth and history as
well as its source.53
Sols was quite clear about what he was doing. We are in the territory
mapped by Jameson in his discussion of third-world literature, in which
the story of private individual destinies is to be read as an allegory of
the embattled situation of the society they belong to, a form of national
allegory that is already present in Villaverdes novel.54 Jameson is con-
cerned with discovering how to read such literature from outside, whereas
Sols is approaching the issue from within, and in full knowledge of
the allegorical power of his target, which is a moving one. Villaverdes
novel, he explained, is an active and living part of national folklore,
 392 Reconnecting

and so are the zarzuela and the ballet, so inevitably it is hard to escape
the tenor of tunes that can be heard every daythe novels romantic
interpretation of nineteenth-century Cuba, the cultural stamp of the
zarzuela that exalts certain republican sectors (similar to the way the music
domesticates the African legacy in [Cuban] culture), the mythication
which, in spite of critical attention, is found in the ballet, and the lm,
he says, is meant as a rebellion against these various versions.55 The
result, according to Caballero and del Ro, is that Sols splits open the
drama in pursuit of a reection on national identity and the weight it
gives to the mulatta. Her inevitable tragedy is seen as an allegory of the
challenges and destiny of the Cuban nation, while the much-discussed
incestbetween siblings in Villaverde, reformulated by Sols as a
motherson relationshiprefers to the unnatural and essentially cor-
rupt relations of metropolis and colony.
At the same time, what Sols intended was a critique of melodrama
without renouncing the melodramatic. He calculated that this could be
achieved through the big operatic gesture he rst deployed in Luca and
further developed in Cantata de Chile, but here folded back into a single
narrative. The operatic conception is reected, on the one hand, in the
music (by Leo Brouwer), and, on the other, in the cinematography (by
Livio Delgado), with both of whom he had worked before on the previ-
ous lms. The result is both highly controlled and highly stylized: the
takes are long and agile, the pace is slow, at times ponderous, the em-
phasis is on an elaborate mise-en-scne modeled on Visconti and the
Eisenstein of Ivan the Terrible. Most of all, the image is dark. The rst
several sequences, and much of the rest of the lm, take place at night,
outdoors and indoors, and when the lm reaches the rst daytime out-
door scene after more than half an hour, the sunlight is sepia-toned.
Again, the lm oended against the popular image of the world it rep-
resented, causing considerable irritation among many of its viewers,
some of whom considered it veritably perverse.
Indubitably, the project suered from the terms of the coproduction
arrangements required to nance it, which required three dierent ver-
sions: for Spanish television, a serial of six hours; for the Cuban cinema
screen, a four-hour version; and for international distribution, another
version running almost three hours. The denouement in the full ver-
sion runs forty-ve minutes, in the shortest version, a mere ten. It is
dicult for a lm to retain its identity in such circumstances, and if the
 Reconnecting 393

full version, for which Sols expresses his own preference, stands up as a
superior piece of television, in the cinema the lm failed to satisfy. As
Paranagua chronicles, Cecilia was massacred by the critics.56 In the weekly
Bohemia it was panned for its Visconti-esque mannerism and an adap-
tation that failed to respect the essence of the novel. Verde Olivothe
magazine of the militaryattacked its excess: its constant high pitch,
overabundance of symbolism, the artice of certain of its situations, which
escape comprehension and dilute the narrative discourse through ex-
cessive generalization. In the satirical magazine El Caimn Barbudo, the
writer Eliseo Alberto regretted the politicization of the story, and the
hysterical relationship between mother and son, which seemed lacking
in historical sense. The newspaper Tribuna de La Habana compared
the whole enterprise to The Fall of the House of Usher, reproaching its
decadent mannerism, denouncing the supposed inuence of German
Expressionism and its doubtful baroque style. But the principal prose-
cutor was Mario Rodrguez Alemn in the newspaper Trabajadores, who
wrote three damning pieces about the lm. Rodrguez Alemn contests
the Freudian treatment, which removes the lm from what he calls
critical realism; nor does he accept the transformation of Pimienta
into Shang, and he nds the ending repulsive. He alleges that the ex-
cessive religious charge, the predominance of the sacred, the priority
given to myth, oneiricism, mysticism, and folklore, are contradictory
elements, relegating the political and social connotations of Villaverdes
original to the background. And he conrms our ndings about the
character of Leonardo in his complaint that Leonardo presents himself
as a pathological case.
His worst charge, however, is that the adaptation completely alters
the original, an inadmissible move when the authorities are engaged in
the eort to preserve the national patrimony. Moreover, not content
with wilfully interfering with a cultural monument, icaic had contra-
vened the orientation declared by the rst party congress, by concen-
trating the resources of the Cuban lm industry on a superproduction.
Paranagua comments that the vocabulary deployed by the lms critics
reveals their resistance to the irruption of the unconscious and the
imaginary, but this attack against Cecilia by an orthodox party critic
should not be underestimated.57 According to Caballero and del Ro,
there was a good deal of monolithic manipulation of opinionof the
kind that they note would occur again almost ten years later with Alicia
 394 Reconnecting

en el pueblo de Maravillaswhich tried to insist on the need to place

conditions on the arbitrary freedom of creativity produced by the Revo-
lution itself. The attack was to prove fatal not for Sols, but to Alfredo
Guevaras leadership of icaic. The lm had tied up so much of the Insti-
tutes production capacity, and overrun its shooting schedule by many
months, throwing everybody elses production plans into disarray
though none of this became public at the timethat it caused consid-
erable chagrin among other lmmakers (the high number of documen-
taries produced in 1980 and 1981 was intended to compensate). When
Cecilia opped, despite European coproduction funding, disarray among
the lmmakers enabled Guevaras old enemies to mount a rearguard
attack and edge him out of power. In 1982, Fidel sent his old friend to
Paris as Cubas ambassador to unesco, and replaced him with Julio
Garca Espinosa. By not acceding to dogmatic advice about his succes-
sor, he allowed that the error of judgment, albeit an expensive miscal-
culation, was a personal one, and it did not impugn the Institute or
place its autonomy in jeopardy.
Garca Espinosa takes an ironic view of the episode, ascribing the
lms failure with the audience to the fact that it literally hit the wrong
note. The zarzuela by Gonzalo Roig, dating from the 1930s, is something
of a travesty of the novel but follows it in one respect. The amorous
triangle between the mulatta, the white, and the mestizo, which is the
typical triangle of a melodrama, was also a little the drama of our his-
tory in the nineteenth century, at a moment when Cuba was about to
embark on its independence struggle, and was looking to see if it were
something more than black and white. The lm does not respect this
triangleit polarizes it in other directions. The zarzuela sticks to it.
The zarzuela was like a national hymnevery soprano of any quality
had to sing itand when the lm didnt use the music of the zarzuela
the public somehow felt cheated, which facilitated attacks on the lm.
Cecilia produced adverse reactions because there have always been sec-
tors who saw icaics political attitude as insuciently orthodox in its
relationship to the countrys reality, because of its critical approach to
that very reality. These sectors have always been latent, and were mobi-
lized by the kind of criticism Cecilia provoked.58
Nevertheless, with Garca Espinosas appointment, everyone at icaic
breathed a sigh of relief and got on with the job, which for Sols meant
a new lm.
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Return of the Popular

Shortly before becoming Alfredo Guevaras successor as head of icaic,

Julio Garca Espinosa returned to the concept of imperfect cinema:
Just as we have to learn things even from the metropolis which is so
much ahead of the underdeveloped countries, so we have to learn from
their cinema too. But just as in our social aspirations were looking for
better means of human self-fulllment, so we have to search for the
appropriate cinema. For me, the societies of the great metropolis are
marked by an economy of waste, and to this economy of waste there
corresponds a culture of waste. Such a diabolical system has been created
that people think that to make the most of their lives they have to be
wasteful of things. And the question is how really to live a full life. So
in the face of a culture of waste you have to search for a culture of true
liberation. Its not possible to propose the idea of a New Economic
Order without a new culture as well. Because in the underdeveloped
world, suering so much scarcity, people still often think that they have
to achieve the same levels of consumption as the developed countries,
and thats a lie. We cannotthe world cannotaspire to such levels of
consumption. Therefore the culture has to provide new ways of feeling
and enjoying life, dierent from irrational consumption. This is the basis
of imperfect cinema. Since were creating a society which, although its
full of imperfections, will nally achieve a new kind of human produc-
tiveness, I suggested a cinema which although it has imperfections is
essentially much more consistent with real human needs.1

When he took the helm at icaic, the obvious question arose: what
would become of these ne ideas?
If an equally obvious place to look for signs of an answer was his own
practice as a lmmaker, Garca Espinosa had directed nothing since Tercer

395
 396 Return of the Popular

mundo, tercer guerra mundial in 1970, except for an episode in a docu-

mentary on the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution, and an
experimental work called Son o no son that had not been released. Here
he set out to interrogate some of the more intractable issues about pop-
ular culture that exercised him while serving as vice minister of culture
in charge of music and spectacles. The title, Son o no son, is a pun: liter-
ally, They are or they arent, son is also the name of an Afro-Cuban
song formlike the rumba, only slower. Titles and music come to an
end. The camera moves in on a stage where a ham actor evokes, in satir-
ical mistranslation, Hamlets famous monologue. Not To be or not to
be but Son or not son. Whether tis nobler in the mind and all that, to
suer the outrage of so many bad songs and stupid soap operas, or
what? But how to end them? That is the question. The bad taste is rem-
iniscent of Mel Brooksnot so much bad taste as the parody of bad
taste. Son o no son remained without a release (until many years later),
although not because it was one of those lms that were rumored in
whispers abroad as instances of censorship, but because the director
himself felt unsatised with it; perhaps it was too experimental. After its
eventual public screening, Caballero and del Ro suggested that it was
not as if the lm were bad, but there were no current theoretical
instruments or aesthetic criteria to understand it, and the solution was
deafening silence.2 It thus led a kind of underground existence as Gar-
ca Espinosa showed it to people who visited icaic, through which, in
fact, it reached its intended audience. For Son o no son is essentially a
polemical essay addressed to fellow practitioners of radical cinema in
Latin America, those with whom Cuban cinema has always been in dia-
logue about culture, politics, and entertainment, in which everything
about mass culture, lm, theater, radio, television, and the rest is ques-
tioned, including the present phase of banality and distortion of national
cultures. It is therefore a kind of laboratory experiment in imperfect
cinema.
The lm takes the form of a musical comedy show, in which song-
and-dance numbers are interspersed with sketches, comic monologues,
documentary inserts, and lm clips. Mostly we are in the Tropicana
nightclub, but in the daytime with no audience, watching rehearsals,
and the banter of the artistes as they work up new routines. We also get
sequences of television-style lectures about North American versus Latin
American cinema, and about the characteristics of Afro-American music;
 Return of the Popular 397

a letter to the Bolivian lm director Jorge Sanjins; a bad joke about

Marshall McLuhan, and a conversation between a couple, voice-over as
we drive through Havana, about the true values of popular culture. It is
also an exemplar of cine pobre, of the lowest possible budget lmmak-
ing: the mise-en-scne is designed to employ the simplest setups and
minimum footage. The lm is not carried by any visual richness but by
its music and its ideas. Sometimes the mise-en-scne suers from a lack
of cuts. The musical numbers are mostly lmed to playback, in long
shots of the dancers and singers with very little camera movement. But
this not only gives the lm a stagy look, it foregrounds the music and
the singing without recourse to the spectacular staging and multiple
camera angles of Hollywood; this is more like the minimalism of Jean-
Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet. Intertextual references to other lms
and directors abound. While the director reads his letter to Sanjins we
see a clip from one of the Bolivians documentary dramas about the
violent repression of workers struggles. The traveling shot through Ha-
vana, through the windshield of the car in which the couple are arguing,
is a parody of Godard. The clip we see of a classic Hollywood musical
Shirley MacLaine in Bob Fosses Sweet Charityis a screen adaptation
of a popular Broadway musical that was derived from Fellinis Notti di
Cabiria. Near the end, the argument of the couple in the car is inter-
rupted by the Kanonen-Song (Canon song) from Bertolt Brecht and
Kurt Weills Threepenny Opera, in a clip from the lm version by Pabst,
and the caption A small homage to Bertolt Brecht who also shared these
anxieties. All this makes for a highly self-reexive lm essay, full of self-
interruptions and allusions that seem cousin to similar practices in Euro-
pean avant-garde cinema of the same period. Or are they? According to
the director himself: I wanted to make the ugliest lm in the world,
that is to say, to eliminate customary expectations like suspense, the
primacy of the image, virtuosic mise-en-scne, beautiful photography,
etc., and for the lm to be sustained only through its dramaturgy. It be-
came the intention to destroy the central nucleus of traditional or Aris-
totelian dramaturgy. It was and is an experimental lm. From Aventuras
de Juan Quin Quin till now, nothing else interests me.3
Except for the musical comedy format, it was all very dierent from
the new lm by Manuel Octavio Gmez, Patakn, which came out in
the year of the handover. An ambitious attempt to make a popular mu-
sicalthe rst in Cuba since Un da en el solar by Eduardo Manet in
 398 Return of the Popular

1965this lm occupies the same zone of Afro-Cuban culture and San-

tera as Cecilia but comes at it from a very dierent angle. Transposing
two gures out of Yoruba mythology (patakn means fable in Yoruba)
to contemporary Cubahere Shang is an irresistible lumpen layabout,
while his nemesis, Ogn, is a staid model workerthe tale takes the
form of a series of disasters followed by a oor show with the added at-
traction of Mr. Death making a cameo appearance as a boxing match
referee, while the score by Rembert Eges romps through a variety of
styles, from Broadway to cabaret to Soviet tractor music. Panned by the
critics (though not unsuccessful with the audience), it might have worked,
if not for two things. From one point of view, a kind of modest version
of West Side Story, from another it suers precisely from the fact that it
isnt West Side Storythe music is pleasant but not nearly distinctive
and biting enough to make it work as a musical. And second, if only it
hadnt tried so hard to t the Yoruba myth to ocial revolutionary ide-
ology, in which the struggle between Shang and Ogn is presented as
the expression of an ancestral struggle between ethical attitudes that
still remain valid, like honesty versus deceit, or seriousness versus su-
perciality. It is as if the lm takes its own premises too seriously, afraid
to carry them beyond a certain limited level of permitted double entendre;
and in this respect it is marked by the political caution of the moment.
One lm fell victim to this caution, when Techo de vidrio (Glass
roof), the rst lm by Sergio Giral to tackle a contemporary theme
that of bureaucratic corruptionwas withheld from exhibition for
aesthetic reasons, according to Caballero and del Ro. When it was re-
leased six years later, opinions diverged. Revolucin y cultura wrote that
Giral had not escaped the triumphalist recipe of the old Soviet cinema,
at the moment that what was needed was to confront the contradic-
tions appearing within socialism; for El Caimn Barbudo, the lm was
neither better not worse than average, but it had one great merit, that of
proposing a reection on ethics.4 Part of the problem lay in the details of
the plot, in which a worker (played by Samuel Claxton), accused of sup-
plying an engineer in the same factory with building materials, resorts to
old religious practices, while the two are treated unequally by the process
of justice, which allows the engineers status in the hierarchy to protect
him. But the lm lends itself to a double reading because the worker is
black and the engineer is white, thus suggesting the persistence of
racism in the interstices of the system. Caballero and del Ro approve
 Return of the Popular 399

the lms fundamental polemicism, its concern for issues that are di-
cult or hidden by ocial discourse, but consider it overschematic,
awed by being seen through tinted and reductive lenses that produce
restricted and partial vision.5
For Rolando Prez Betancourt, the merit of the lm was that it as-
sumed the risk of the interpretation of problems and conicts inherent
to the era. These lines, however, by a leading lm critic writing in the
party newspaper Granma, are best read, in the spirit of Erving Goman,
symptomatically, where the words inherent to the era refer back to
the political context at the moment when the lm was made. In 1982,
Castro began to attack misconduct such as the misuse of state funds by
managers of enterprises, and illegitimate prots made by middlemen
on the free farmers markets that had been introduced two years earlier.
It took four years before the farmers markets were closed down and an
oensive declared against those who confuse income from work and
speculation, or ddlers who are little better than thieves, and indeed
often are thieves.6 Thus, by the time the lm was released, what was
problematic to represent on screen in 1982, despite borrowing Castros
authority, had acquired an ocial vocabulary: corrupcin, doble moral,
falta de exigencia, amiguismo, desinterscorruption, double morals,
lack of care, buddyism, indierence. Ocially, these are code words for
modes of behavior inherited from the time of the pseudorepublic and
dependent capitalism, succored by petit bourgeois tendencies that con-
travened communist ideals and contradicted the image of el hombre
nuevo, the new man of socialism. But there is also another interpreta-
tionthat they implied various forms of failure within the revolution-
ary project, identied with the economic, social, and political eects of
the reform begun in the mid-1970s, which led to the growth of bureau-
cracy, privileges, and corruption, a fall in labor productivity, and even-
tually the development of a black market. Clearly, it was one thing for
Castro to denounce what troubled him and another for a lm to attempt
to portray the same problems, especially when the thematic of racial
representation added to the diculty. Giral told this writer before the
lm was completed that he knew he was treading on delicate ground;
the subsequent ban on the lm came from high places above icaic,
and in discussions with the partys ideological chiefs the lm was found
to suer from aesthetic and dramatic weaknesses that made it dicult
for icaics defense of it to prevail.7 Again, reading symptomatically, one
 400 Return of the Popular

supposes that all this is known to Jos Antonio Evora when he writes
that this was a lm that, despite its pamphleteering tone, answered to
urgent social needs, and should be considered a pioneer of a critical
line that (in the directors own words) would open up channels for the
disalienation of self-censorship.8
The other new ction lm to appear in 1982 was the rst feature by
novelist and documentarist Jess Daz. At rst sight, Polvo rojo (Red
dust) is evidence of a trend in which the documentarist-turned-feature
director must prove his spurs with a debut aimed at a popular audience,
which in practice means a genre piece. Daz chooses a historical drama,
based on real events, the story of a small mining town in a third-world
country at a time of revolution, where the plant is owned by North
Americans; in short, Cuba 1959, and the town of Moa in Oriente. At rst
the North Americans believe they can reach an accommodation with
the new regime, largely because they think the Cubans incapable of oper-
ating the plant for themselves; events force them to pull out all the same,
leaving behind a single technician who comes under suspicion for his
political ambivalence, but in the eort to get the plant started up again
becomes more and more committed to the revolutionary process, even
when his family decides to abandon the country. This thematic link with
Dazs earlier documentary, 55 hermanos (55 brothers and sisters), gives
the lm its allegorical level: behind the public drama is the pathos of the
equally political but private drama of the division of families. But this
public-private drama is not over, and Dazs lm therefore takes on inter-
textual allusion to subsequent events such as the Mariel exodus of 1980.
Mariel was an ugly moment in the history of the Cuban Revolution,
when a hundred thousand people crowded into embassy compounds
and forced the Cuban government to let them leave, mostly, of course,
to Miami. Early in 1979, Cuba had opened its doors for Miami Cubans
to visit friends and family in Cuba; more than a hundred thousand of
them came, bringing dollars, gifts, and tales of prosperity. The disdain-
ful and ill-informed attitudes of the visitors often renewed the division
of families rather than healing it, and the government was much criti-
cized. A weak economy contributed to discontent, especially among
underemployed young men who saw few prospects for self-improvement,
and foreign embassies began receiving waves of applicants for visas to
emigrate. Miami was the most popular destination, but Washington
 Return of the Popular 401

wasnt opening the doors. To force the situation, in April 1980 Castro
declared them free to leavethrough the small port of Mariel near
Havana. By October, nearly 150,000 people had taken up the oer, of
whom 120,000 headed for the States, where Jimmy Carter welcomed
these new refugees from Communism with an open heart and open
arms. However, Washington was soon accusing Castro of taking his re-
venge by sending delinquents, criminals, and even the inmates of men-
tal hospitals, all mixed in with the political refugees. Castro replied with
a denial, describing the Marielitos as an antigovernment and antisocial
lumpen, and the only mentally ill people transported in the boatlift
had been requested by family members already living in the United States.
The truth, as this writer discovered from subsequent conversations in
Havana, is that the situation had got out of control and there were inci-
dents in which people turned on neighbors they distrusted and forced
them to go; some of them were malcontents and petty criminals of one
kind or another; others were gays.
In short, Polvo rojo is not simply a historical genre movie about the
early days of the Revolution, but a lm that addressed itself implicitly to
one of the most upsetting legacies of the social disruption entailed by
the unfolding political dynamic of the Revolution. When it was screened
at a festival in the United States, the Los Angeles Times found it an im-
pressive combination of the epic and the personal, although from a
dierent perspective it relies too readily on the expectable characteris-
tics of the genre, and the direction of the concluding scenes was ued.
The director readily admitted it, adding that before making this lm he
had never been on a ction lm set, even as an observer.9

Garca Espinosa quickly brought fresh vision to icaic, pursuing a pol-

icy of low-budget production, and giving a new generation of directors
a chance to prove themselves. In due course he would go further, and
devolve the internal decision-making process to teams of directors work-
ing in groups. Initially, the recipe was straightforward: to increase the
number of lms being made and bring in new blood by abandoning
costly productions, holding budgets down to 125,000 pesos and four
weeks shooting. As one of the rst of these lms, he approved a new
script by Humberto Sols, a move designed to give reassurance that
oenses committed by artistic license are not considered sanctionable.
 402 Return of the Popular

The following year, Sols came back with Amada, and Alea came up with
Hasta cierto punto (Up to a Point), a project started before the changeover
at the top.
The lm by Sols is another, but much more modest, historical drama.
Havana, 1914: Amada, a young conservative woman from a declining
aristocratic family, is in a lifeless marriage to a politician; tied to obso-
lete values, she falls passionately in love with her cousin Marcial, an an-
archist poet who tries to shake her out of her traditionalism. Sols aims
at a psychological study, replete with whispers, faces bathed in tears,
and repeated close-ups, which takes the temperature of an epoch of
frustration to become a strong indictment of patriarchal politics.10 A
professional stylistic exercise with skilled contributions from composer
Leo Brouwer, cinematographer Livio Delgado, and Eslinda Nez in
the title role.
In Hasta cierto punto, on the other hand, center stage is given to the
identity crisis of Cuban cinema itself, as Alea returns to the theme of the
relationship of the intellectual to the Revolution that he rst explored
in Memorias del subdesarrollo. The new lm contrasts the lmmakers
world with that of the Havana dockworkers, where scar, a scriptwriter,
and Arturo, a director, are planning to make a lm about machismo. In
the course of their investigations, scar becomes embroiled in a fraught
relationship with Lina, a checker at the docks and an unmarried mother;
the relationship, which throws the theme of the proposed movie into
ironic perspective, comes to nothing because the writer wont leave his
wife. The lm opens with one of the interviews that they videotape as
part of their research, in which a black dockworker is saying, I cant do it,
because Ive lived so long in the old society. . . . Im 80 percent changed,
but I cant make it 100 percent . . . because this business about equality
between men and women is correct, but only up to a point [hasta cierta
punto]. Alea adopts the phrase as the title of the lm because it evokes
De cierta manera and Sara Gmez, to whom this lm pays beautiful
homage, as Jess Daz puts it: one of the rare instances in history where
the master had enough humility to publicly recognize his disciple.11
Like its predecessor, Hasta cierto punto is told in two modes: docu-
mentary (the video recordings of interviews and workers meetings) and
ction (the rest of the scenario). Thanks to Aleas know-how and expe-
rience, says Daz, the former never falls into didacticism, as it did in De
cierta manera. In the earlier lm, the documentary sequences serve
 Return of the Popular 403

broadly to the locate the protagonists within a certain cultural history

elaborated by an ideologically orthodox commentary; here, without
commentary, they locate them within a messy present. Where Gmez
proposes a historicist analysis of social contradictions, within a classic
Marxist teleology that leads to a utopian future, Alea oers a synchronic
analysis, a cognitive mapping of the same territory but one that is nec-
essarily much more open and incomplete, a quality that Zuzana Pick
locates not just within the structure of the narrative but in the method-
ology employed in making the lm, an approach similar to documen-
tary lm-making whereby the result of research motivates narrative and
formal choices.12 She is not mistaken that this methodology implied a
critique of the situation at icaic, where directors were trained in doc-
umentary, their scripts were criticized when they turned to ction, and,
ironically, scriptwriters were hired to turn them into formally correct
shooting scripts. This, Alea seems to want to say, is no way to go about
things.
The video footage in Hasta cierto punto was shot by Alea with a skele-
ton crew during the preproduction of the lm, originally as part of
their own research. But, as he told Enrique Colina in an interview, they
quickly thought of the idea of incorporating this footage in the lm it-
self as a form of documentary testimoniala risky undertaking, said
Alea, because of the surprises it would throw up (naturally, because a
lm that abandons a homogeneous narrative to incorporate a multi-
plicity of voices is necessarily more dicult to control, and indeed can
hardly manage to do so according to traditional criteria of narrative co-
herence). They then began the main shoot without a completed script
but only a provisional outline, which was built up as we proceeded, as we
were engaged in the investigation. We had to change the problematic var-
ious times. . . . Sometimes dramatic possibilities arose that corresponded
to our ideas, but the themes would also escape our objectives.13 Indeed,
this process becomes part of the subject matter of the lm in front of us
on the screen. Not only do the video sequences constantly pull the viewer
back into the real worldthe primary world of the workers where the
ctional characters are guestsbut, as the scriptwriter remarks to his
wife, We went to a workers assembly and very interesting things came
up. Now I dont know how to put all these issues into a simple love
story. This, too, thenthe impossibility of making the lm that were
watchingis the subject that the lm presents to the viewer, in a quasi-
 404 Return of the Popular

Brechtian fashion characterized by self-interruption and ironic self-

reference, and the distantiation produced by the counterpoint of docu-
mentary and ction. In short, notwithstanding the central role of the
romance, the video interviews set the stage, as Pick describes it, for a
critique of gender and class relations that highlights conicts that the
intended lm within a lm is unable, or perhaps refuses, to resolve.14
Other writers nd parallels between the two lms by teacher and dis-
ciple. Catherine Davies observes that both focus on a love aair between
a man and a woman from dierent class backgrounds, though here it is
the man who is middle-class and the woman who is working-class; in
both, it is the female protagonist who most clearly represents the revo-
lution and pushes for change, while the male ego, based on power and
privilege, is seen to be under threat; in both lms, substantial scenes
are located in places of work (a bus factory, the docks), with prominent
scenes of workers assemblies.15 One of these assembles is where scar
rst spots Lina, as she makes a public protest about hazardous working
conditions. scar, looking for someone to serve as a model for his lm
character, is dazzled by her forceful intervention, and a relationship de-
velops between the bourgeois intellectual and the unmarried working-
class mother with a boy of twelve, which produces a crisis in scars
marriage to his actress wife, Marin, who is slated to play the character
based on his lover. The aair also changes scars take on the script he
is supposed to be writing. Setting out to corroborate his directors ortho-
dox thesis that machismo is a vestige of prerevolutionary thinking, he
begins to change his views. Arturo, who has observed the funny look in
scars face whenever Lina is around, suspects that the intentions of the
script are threatened by scars infatuation. scar and Arturo begin to
disagree over the way the script is progressing, as the director resists his
scriptwriters growing grasp of the real milieu. When scar suggests
that maybe the heroine should be an unmarried mother, Arturo parries
Like Moscow Doesnt Believe in Tears? scar realizes the dangers of
isolating machismo from its class context; in a muted showdown with
his director, he protests that it isnt enough to portray the macho as a
man who beats his wife and wont let her go out to work: its much
more complicated. But scar has been seen with Lina, and Arturo be-
lieves the aair has distorted scars judgment. The lm falls through
at least for scarwhile Lina, dissatised with her lack of prospects at
the dock, does what she told scar when they rst met that she was
 Return of the Popular 405

thinking of doing, and ies o to another life back in Santiago de Cuba

where (like Sara Gmez) she grew up.
For Marvin DLugo, the most striking formal feature that Alea bor-
rows from Gmez is the scenes of the workers assemblies, which amount
to the staging of an on-screen audience within the lm who comment
on and assess the themes that shape the lms narrative.16 These scenes
have a special interest from a sociological point of view, for the partici-
pation of the workers themselves as actors in the lm, and the intense
documentary quality of the lming, turn them into primary evidence
of the exercise of power in the workplace, and of the adaptation of such
participation to the political climate of the day.17 Workers councils were
formally set up in 1965 to rule on problems of violations of labor law
and indisciplineas occurs in De cierta manera. This function was
eroded by changes introduced in the period of institutionalization in
the late 1970s. By the time of Hasta cierto punto, workers assemblies
have become occasions where workers debate the problems of manage-
ment in an economy that is showing serious signs of strain. When the
workers in the lm also appear in a series of spontaneous, unscripted
interviews, the result is to enunciate a sense of collective identity and
values that reminds DLugo of what Stanley Fish called an interpretive
community. The eect is that of conjoining a Greek chorus and a Brecht-
ian commentary that serves for the Cuban audience as a conduit be-
tween the lm and the viewer, because the interpretive community on-
screen (leaving aside the particular social sector of the individual audience
member) is continuous with the one oscreena particularly useful
form of triangulation that is also found in other Cuban lms, like Us-
tedes tienen la palabra. But if these scenes embody the theme of the com-
munitys participation in the prosecution of revolutionary values, then
it is not because they hold the key to the truth but because the commu-
nity is both the site of the problem and the proper space of communica-
tive dialogue about solutions, and this dialogue is what activates the
lms textual complexity. What passes for a straightforward love story is
continually subjected to a form of oblique scrutiny and indirect cri-
tique, through the agency of an interpretive community whose presence
on-screen is doubled by its counterpart in front of the screen. The lm
acquires a divergent structurea dicult balance between the inquiry
on machismo and the love storythat Cuban critics found wanting,
although Pick feels that the lms refusal to provide answers to the
 406 Return of the Popular

problems it presents is indeed counterbalanced by the way in which it

activates a critical exchange between the screen and the viewer.
Is Hasta cierto punto a feminist lm, or only a lm about the crisis of
masculinity? Davies thinks that Lina is too idealized, and her experience
fails to match that of the vast majority of Cuban working mothers. Pick,
on the other hand, believes that the lm sets up a forceful paradox be-
tween the romantic imaginary and female desire in which Linas char-
acter (powerfully played by Mirta Ibarra) acts out a subtle, yet power-
ful, resistance to machismo. For DLugo, Lina functions as the catalyst
for Oscars confrontation with the conning patterns of his own con-
sciousness18 she tells him machismo is everywhere, not just among
dockers; she criticizes the absence of women in a crew making a lm
about machismo; she warns him not to confuse her with the ctional
character of his proposed movie. She goes to the theater to see a play he
has written, a social comedy, which ends with the leading character refus-
ing to nish according to the script, which she throws at the audience;
Lina is not convinced by this Brechtian gesture. Her view of cinema is a
popular one, and shes puzzled by what scar is looking for. You spend
all day handling sacks in the dock, she protests, then in the movies
you see the same thing? No one will go and see that lm. When people
go to the movies after work, they want to cut o [desconectar], see nice
entertaining things, right? Although their relationship is portrayed with
tenderness, says another writer, Jorge Runelli, it is also a vicious circle.
Alea-scar symbolizes Lina as a bird in ight, in the words of a Basque
song that serves as an epigram for the lm, and which scar plays Lina
on a cassette: I could clip her wings if I liked / Then she couldnt y /
and shed be mine / but what I love is the bird. He, and the lm, begin
by positioning her as an alluring object of research and investigation,
but she refuses to be pinned down and ends by escaping, belying the
implicit machismo of the song playing the lm out on the sound track
by suggesting that he could not have clipped her wings if hed wanted to
after all. Here too there is an echo of De cierta manera, which similarly
ends with a song with an ambiguous moral, and a certain dose of irony,
as if Lina were tearing up Oscars script, and . . . Alea were tearing up
his own script and . . . tossing it into the lap of the audience.19
Nevertheless, the ending has been criticized as too facile. For Davies,
who nds the lm wanting in comparison to De cierta manera, The re-
sult is a sentimental romance, which goes nowhere, couched in an over-
 Return of the Popular 407

view of Cuban society as experiencing stasis and paralysis at the levels

of production, morality and art.20 Daz thinks that Alea privileges the
love story to the detriment of the documentary. Pick takes a more com-
plex view: on the one hand, it is as if the sociological purpose of the
issues raised in the videotaped segments is progressively eclipsed by tra-
ditional melodramatic convention, but a closer look suggests a pattern
to the video footage with broader implications.21 As the clips shift from
talk about machismo, by way of collective voicing of labor issues, to re-
ections on individual consciousness and responsibility, the interviews
broaden out beyond their function as an ironic counterpoint to the nar-
rative, to evoke the larger community as the source and arbiter of the
social meanings presented and contested within the lm. This reposi-
tioning coincides with the dramatic portrayal of scars machismo and
Arturos inability to shed his preconceived ideas, and amounts to a cri-
tique of both of them. Although clearly Aleas sympathy in the conict
between them is with his ctional scriptwriter, the lm, as Runelli
puts it, criticizes the intellectuals vision of the workers and the schematic
positivism of cinema, at least as conceived by Arturo.22

For Alea himself, the lm is marked by the same concerns he had just
written about in an essay on cinema called The Viewers Dialectic, a kind
of formal credo of an independent Marxist intellectual that represents
Aleas version of imperfect cinema. The argument is a thoroughly mate-
rialist oneAlea never doubts that there is a physical reality that cin-
ema promises to redeem, but this reality and its representation are both
of them thoroughly problematic. The lmmaker, he says, is immersed
in a complex milieu, with a profound meaning which does not lie on
the surface. If lm-makers want to express their world coherently, and
at the same time respond to the demands their world places on them,
they should go out armed not just with a camera and their sensibility,
but also with solid theoretical judgement.23 The question was especially
vigilant in Cuba: The level of complexity at which the ideological strug-
gle unfolds makes demands on lm-makers to overcome completely
not only the spontaneity of the rst years of the revolutionary triumph
but also the dangers inherent in a tendency to schematize (18).
Alea engages in a theoretical debate because Film not only entertains
and informs, it also shapes taste, intellectual judgement and states of
consciousness. If lm-makers are fully to assume their own social and
 408 Return of the Popular

historical responsibilities, they will have to come face to face with the
inevitable need to promote the theoretical development of their artistic
practice (37). To begin with, he disposes of the old form/content debate
with the comment that the separation of form and content is simplistic;
it is a bureaucratic idea to suppose that content is what lls up a form,
and worst of all, it also construes the spectator as a passive receptor. The
spectator, Alea insists, is neither an abstraction nor a passive monad
but a social being who is historically and socially conditioned, who is
cast, by denition, in an attitude of contemplation, a condition not only
induced by the object being contemplated (the lm) but by the position
the subject occupies in relation to it. People can be actors or spectators
in the face of the same phenomenon, and the task of a radical cinema is
to waken them from their slumbering.
In fact, cinema oers the audience dierent modes of address, allows
them various levels of mediation, which carry them toward or away
from reality. Cinema may produce a mythology, an illusory conscious-
ness, populated only by imaginary beings, by ghosts that vanish as soon
as the spectators are forced to face up to their own reality, to stop being
spectators. Or else it can be demythifying, and send the spectators out
into the street to become actors in their own lives. The dierent capac-
ities of cinema are not mutually exclusive, just as emotion and intellect
are not opposed; the question is how to engage the one in relation to
the other. For illumination, Alea compares the twin stars of Marxist aes-
thetics in practice, Eisenstein and Brecht. Cinema, he nds, has certain
resources highly akin to Brechts notion of distantiation, the eect of
estrangement or defamiliarization that is the precondition of discover-
ing anything, as in Hegels dictum, which Alea quotes, The familiar,
just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. Indeed, the
art of montage, elucidated by Eisenstein, constitutes a specically cine-
matic mode of the estrangement eect, a resource for revealing new data
about reality, a means of discovering truths previously obscured by
accommodation to daily life (46). The meeting between the two is all
the more signicant because they approach the problem from opposite
ends. Eisenstein directs his attention to the logic of emotionsworking
through the emotions toward intellectwhereas Brecht is concerned
with the emotion of logic, with mobilizing the pleasure of intellectual
recognition. Eisensteins sense of pathos and Brechts technique of es-
trangement are two moments of the same dialectical process, a move-
 Return of the Popular 409

ment between attraction and separation, which also constitute two mo-
ments in the relation of the spectator to the spectacle. Alea thinks the
shift from one state to the other can happen several times as the specta-
cle unfolds, and is analogous to the experience of shifting from every-
day reality to the theater or cinema and back again. This is the dialectic
of the spectator, this leaving everyday reality to submerge themselves
into a ctional reality, an autonomous world in which they will recog-
nise themselves, and after which they return enriched by the experi-
ence, is also a shift of alienation and de-alienation.
Perhaps Hasta cierto punto tries too hard to be a thesis lm, which, as
Alea himself admitted, hasta cierto punto se logr (is achieved up to a
point).24 The character of Arturo, he felt, emerged too weak, and he re-
gretted the casting.25 Yet the lm, especially with Mario Garca Joyas
highly mobile camera, has great uidity, and the editing, by Miriam
Talavera, gives it immense narrative economyachieved precisely by
cutting back and forth between dierent levels of reality and condensing
the entire story into barely seventy minutes. Nevertheless, the impres-
sion it gives is not that it has been censored but simply truncated in
some way, leaving untidy traces, to end without a climax, resolution, or
catharsis. Instead, it exposes as a defense mechanism what Jameson, in
the essay mentioned earlier, calls our deep cultural conviction that
our private life experience is somehow incommensurable with the ab-
stractions of economic science and political dynamics. In that case,
perhaps it is almost bound to frustrate, precisely to the extent that it
begins to work on us. Given Aleas method, perhaps this was inevitable,
and not at all a conventional mark of failure. The failure would have
been for the lm to conrm the split between public and private that
permits the machismo to continue.

Jorge Fraga told his British visitors in 1983 that All Cuban lms of the
last ten years have attracted full houses for the rst two weeks, whether
the lm was liked or not. They have to see it for themselves; the lms
have a prestige of their own. Before the Revolution people didnt go to
see a lm because it was Cuban, and now they go because it is. But he
thought that Cuban cinema had changed its image since the 1960s, with
lms like La primera carga al machete and Memorias del subdesarrollo
giving way to titles such as El hombre de Maisinic and Retrato de Teresa,
which do not appear so modern. What did this mean? That icaic
 410 Return of the Popular

was becoming some sort of standardised production unit because of

an excessive concern with public opinion? Its possible, I dont deny it.
But he felt that the innovations of the 1960s had their own limitations.
He claimed, for example, that Luca was much less innovative from a dra-
maturgical point of view than Teresa, which shattered the conventions
of its genre without any pyrotechnics. And even those lms, such as El
hombre de Maisinic, that appear to borrow the format of Hollywood
genres like the western, ended up quite dierent from Hollywood drama-
turgy, through a form of treatment that brings to Fragas mind the title
of an essay by the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, the dissimilarity
of the similar.26 Perhaps what Fraga is arguing here is a serious and
plausible theoretical position, but not one that was fashionable at the
time, and it therefore sounds more like a defense of populism. But it
was not the same as the position held by Garca Espinosa, who, looking
back years later, emphasized that for him the objective was not a pop-
ulist but a popular cinema, which avoided pandering to anyone or any-
thing because it was palpably engaged in a dialogue with popular cul-
ture, and thus also transcended the inherited separation of the popular
from the elite, which, after all, would only be to fulll the promise of
cinema as the true democratic art form of the twentieth century.27
A special season of new lms presented at the end of March 1984 to
celebrate icaics rst twenty-ve years already reected the changes
brought in by Garca Espinosa. There were half a dozen of them, three by
established directorsEnrique Pineda Barnet, Pastor Vega, and Manuel
Prezand three debuts, by Miguel Torres, Rolando Daz, and Juan
Carlos Tabo. In the case of the rst group, none of the lms are among
their best. Tiempo de amar (Time to love) by Enrique Pineda Barnet is a
love story set against the missile crisis of October 1962, of private senti-
ments in the midst of the countrys mobilization, in the style, says Peter
Schumann, of the French director Claude Lelouch. Equally unconvinc-
ing was Habanera by Pastor Vega, in which a psychologist tries to real-
ize her personal aims in an exquisite bourgeois milieu which has little
or nothing to do with the reality of a Spartan society like Cuba. But, in
Schumanns unkindest cut, Prezs La segunda hora de Esteban Zayas
(The second hour of Esteban Zayas)the story of man marked by a
sense of political failure who is pulled back into militant politics in the
1950sturns into the hour of truth for its director.28 The Cuban crit-
ics did not think highly of the lm either.
 Return of the Popular 411

Of the three new feature directors, Miguel Torres, unusually, came

from television. His lm Primero de enero (First of January) is aptly de-
scribed by Schumann as a kind of epic song to the triumph of the
Revolution in which Torres reconstructs history, using the style of the
newsreel of the epoch, transforming the material in such a way that it
becomes dicult to distinguish genuine historical footage from the re-
constructions.29 It was not a great hit with the public. Real success was
reserved for the other two newcomers: both Los pjaros tirndole a la es-
copeta (Tables turned) by Rolando Daz, and Se permuta (For exchange)
by Juan Carlos Tabo, attracted huge audiences. In the list of most pop-
ular Cuban lms compiled by icaic in 1988, they come second and
fourth, respectively, with audiences of 2.8 million and 2.2 million (see
Table 3). Both are comedies that propose a critical vision of daily reality.
Los pjaros is a story of machismo in which the son forbids his mother
to have a relationship with the man who is the father of the woman he
himself is in love with. This creates of a set of complications that are re-
solved with the necessary dose of good humor about generational con-
ict. Comic complications are also the order of the day in Se permuta,
in which a woman decides to move to what she considers a better
neighborhood in order to get her daughter away from her suitor, a mere
mechanic. The problem? How to get ahead in a society that professes
everyone to be equal. The phenomenon of the house-buying chain is
known in other countriesand there are other lms about itbut
in Havana, where no one is buying or selling, but only swapping, the
intricacies of organizing a chain are of a dierent order. The lm was
very timely. The house swap, a spontaneous but piecemeal solution to
Havanas housing problems, was neither legal nor illegal, but had devel-
oped to such a point that it provoked a public debate about the need for
solutions. The year after the lm appeared, the National Assembly ap-
proved a new housing law that allowed tenants to become house owners
and let out rooms in certain circumstances.
In the process of following Glorias endeavors, the lm paints a mul-
tiple portrait of diverse personalities and attitudes within the society,
ranging from an idealist architect to an opportunistic bureaucrat, to
great comic eect, with the result, as Jess Daz puts it, that while bureau-
cracy is seen as an impersonal machine, the lm celebrates the resource-
fulness with which people solve their own problems.30 The lm bears
allegiance to the comic world of Alea. Indeed, Se permuta started life as
 412 Return of the Popular

Table 3. Top Cuban lms by admission, 198087 (Cuba)

Admissions
Film Director Year (in millions)
Guardafronteras Octavio Cortzar 1980 2.5
Polvo rojo Jess Daz 1981 1.1
Se permuta Juan Carlos Tabo 1983 2.2
Los pjaros tirndole a la Rolando Daz 1984 2.8
escopeta
De tal pedro, tal astilla Luis Felipe Bernaza 1985 1.8
Una novia para David Orlando Rojas 1985 1.4
En tres y dos Rolando Daz 1985 1.0
Clandestinos Fernando Prez 1987 1.1

a stage play based on an idea of Aleas to use a chain of house swaps as

a pretext to reveal a cross section of our society31 the same play of
which we catch a glimpse in Hasta cierto punto, where its authorship is
attributed to the character of scar. (Tabo was very much Aleas pro-
tg and would later become his most seless collaborator when he sup-
ported him in his illness by codirecting his two last lms.) The lm was
a particular success for Rosa Forns, an actress who had made many
lms in Mexico but here appeared in her rst for icaic, re-creating
her stage role on lm.
If Tabo has the edge over Rolando Daz when it comes to comic tim-
ing, these two lms between them eectively reinvent the genre of so-
cial comedy pioneered by Alea and Garca Espinosa in the 1960s; they
take up the earlier lms play upon revolutionary manners to reinsert it
into a quite dierent social climate, where comedy becomes the most
eective way of engaging in social criticism. Both are debut features
that establish a new genre of sociocritical comedy that will grow stronger
over the years, developing into one of the most eective strands in
icaics output (and in the 1990s, evolving a surrealistic strand). That
both these lms use generational conict and amorous aairs as their
basic material is not just because these topics commend themselves as a
photogenic site for exploration, especially given the vitality of the pop-
ular sense of humor, but because they mark the parallel emergence of
new generations. These lms appeared at the moment when those born
in the rst few years of the Revolution were reaching their maturity. In
 Return of the Popular 413

1984, more than half the population was born after 1959. They were not
to experience the same forms of poverty, illiteracy, and discrimination
that obtained before the overthrow of Batista. But the previous genera-
tion, who came of age in the 1960s, had enjoyed ready social promotion
because of the lack of cadres (and the emigration of so many middle-
class professionals); the next generation would nd social advancement
more dicult, especially as pockets of hidden unemployment placed a
brake on prospects for the professional development of new blood.
icaic itself represented a peculiar variation on this theme. Those
who are commonly thought of as the rst generation of directors break
down into several groups: the founders (including Guevara, Alea, Garca
Espinosa, and lvarez), who were then mostly in their thirties and had
prior experience in lm production (or, in the case of lvarez, radio); a
second group who debuted in the early 1960s (including Sols, Manuel
Prez, and Sergio Giral); and a younger group of apprentice directors
who made their rst lms in the mid- to late 1960s (Tabo, Sara Gmez,
Cortzar, and others). What unites this otherwise disparate collectivity
is their shared experience of the heady, euphoric years of the 1960s.
Those in the second group generally made their rst features in the late
1960s or early 1970s; for those in the third group, the prospects were
rather more patchyicaic had reached the limits of its resources for
large-scale production. On the other hand, production of shorts and
newsreels allowed the recruitment of what became the second genera-
tion of directors, those who began to make lms in the 1970s, whose
graduation to features was delayed until the early 1980s. They were not
in conict with the generation that preceded themon the contrary,
they respected them highlybut their experience of the Revolution had
already moved on. As a result, when they got their chance, they imme-
diately opened up a new space, a new thematics that corresponded to a
social reality recongured by the accelerated social development of the
Revolution, within which attitudes and values change more rapidly than
outside, and to judge from the lms, successive generations get wise
more quickly.
The new regime of Garca Espinosa was beginning to work. Out of
120 new feature lms released in Cuba during 1984, as many as eight
were Cuban, and they were seen by almost 20 percent of the total audi-
ence; the following year came another eight, including ve debut fea-
tures, three of which achieved audiences of one million or more (Table 3).
 414 Return of the Popular

For Caballero and del Ro, looking back, this renovation succeeded only
up to a point. The number of lms produced increased, and new direc-
tors entered the scene, but the majority by way of a decorous opera
prima designed to appeal to the popular audience. Garca Espinosa, also
looking back, defended his record. The promotion of new directors was
urgent, so the rst thing was to increase production. This meant some
consternation for the public since these debut lms, though generally
superior to those of the 1960s, were often easy to criticize; but it opened
the possibility to a greater pluralism. There was neither a single political
line that feature production was required to follow nor a single artistic
line, although comedies clearly had a special value in the circumstances
of the periodthey represented a popular current undervalued in com-
parison to straight drama, but you could do more disturbing things
with them.32
Meanwhile, among the new documentary directors who emerged in
the 1980s were a number of women who developed a new optic of their
own. Two lms by Marisol Trujillo in 1983 stand at the beginning of
this new trend, Mujer ante el espejo (Woman facing the mirror) and
Oracin (Prayer). In the former, the classical ballet dancer Charn ob-
serves the changes in her body brought about by pregnancy and then
returns to the stage with a new self-image. The latter follows the model
of lvarez, a brilliant and disturbing experimental lm essay using noth-
ing but found footage to compose a montage to accompany a poem
about Marilyn Monroe by the Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Carde-
nal. Here, while the text speaks of Monroe as an innocent who dreamed
of becoming a star and only acted the script that we gave her, the
image ranges disjunctively from clips of her lms to scenes of warfare
and mass protest that indict the hegemony of the empire. These and
other short lms by other directors, including Rebeca Chvez and Mayra
Vilsis, achieve what Catherine Benamou calls an expansion inward
of the testimonial documentary into the exploration of feminine sub-
jectivity, even when the subjects are public gures like Rigoberta Mench
and Winnie Mandela, where the contrapuntal use of the female voice,
archival images, and music drawn from dierent contexts emphasizes
the historical connection between the protagonists evolving sense of
identity and their national arenas of struggle, without losing sight of
the aective inuences on their inner-developing consciousness.33
 Return of the Popular 415

Mention should also be made of other currents, with productions by

entities that included the studios of the Armed Forces (ectvfar) and
the television stations.34 There were also the lm-club activists who be-
gan to become organized at the end of the 1970s, although all this work
remains outside the purview of the present study, except for the fact
that one or two of the directors involved, notably Toms Piard, would
also make inroads in cinema (or television).

The changes at icaic under Garca Espinosa were not programmatic,

nor do they suggest a smooth translation of the ideas of imperfect cin-
ema from page to practice, but rather a principled policy to succor a
pluralist space of respect for creative endeavor. The Havana Film Festival
ensured that the results were now regularly exposed to a sympathetic
international audiencethe lmmakers of the new cinema movement
in Latin America who brought their own lms and watched them side
by side. To mount the festival, icaic created a network of collaborators
across the continent, who organized the selection of lms and national
contingents. Selection was ocially open, and in many countries it was
more a question of ensuring supply than choosing lms that observed
particular criteria. In practice, an unspoken code encouraged indepen-
dent lmmakers and kept away producers who were politically reluc-
tant to be seen in Cuba. As a result, most worthwhile production found
its way to Havana, while purely commercial stu, like Brazilian porno-
chanchada, did not. By 1983, there were 160 distributors from thirty-one
countriesin Latin America and elsewherein the market section of
the festival, mecla (Mercado de Cine Latinoamericano).
The festival included from the outset an accompanying program of
meetings, seminars, and symposiums, on topics like the role of trans-
national capitalism in media and communications, or the functions of
criticism. The intellectual agenda was encapsulated at the very rst fes-
tival in a contribution by the North American political scientist Herbert
Schiller, who analyzed the semantics of terms like the free ow of infor-
mation and underdevelopment. The former, he explained, was used by
the powerful to disguise the structures of control that in fact impede
the free ow of information, and that operate at a global level through
transnational corporations. Underdevelopment is more paradoxical. It
is not a mark of underdevelopment, he said, to use simple and tradi-
 416 Return of the Popular

tional means of communication. On the contrary, advanced technolo-

gies are not only extremely powerful, they induce a frightening degree
of passivity in the public. Only communication as a collective and recip-
rocal social activity can be strong enough to combat the technological
apparatus of the transnationals. This is an analysis that corroborates
that of imperfect cinema, implicitly supporting the project of a new
cinema based in quasi-artisanal modes of production, motivated by a
profound desire for communicative action, and faced with the need to
carve out space for itself both nationally and, if possible, internationally.35
Garca Espinosa saw the festival as a means of invading this inter-
national space on condition that the lms were promoted more aggres-
sively. The formula he applied included opening the festival up to tele-
vision and video, and recruiting the presence of stars, mainly from
Hollywood, who were known from private contacts to be suciently
sympathetic toward Cuba to accept an invitation. (Their reward would
be a meeting with the Comandante en Jefe; but then, every visitor from
California strengthened Hollywoods growing disapproval of Washington
policy toward Cuba.) A big push was made for the seventh edition of
the festival in 1985, at which 100 features, 150 documentaries, and more
than 400 videos were projected for some two thousand foreign delegates,
who included Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Lemmon, Harry Belafonte,
Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Treat Williams. Behind the
publicity operation, the delegates engaged in serious work. There were
meetings of international committees of organizations like the Congreso
Internacional de Cine Clubes and the Sindicatos y Uniones de Actores
Latinoamericanos, and the creation of new ones. These included a new
Fundacin del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, one of whose tasks would
be the establishment of a new international lm school, located in Cuba,
with support from the Cuban government, though its students would
be drawn from the three continents of the tricontinental movement of
the 1960sLatin America, Africa, and Asia. The school was ocially
opened by Castro the following year, at San Antonio de los Baos near
Havana, with Fernando Birri as its rst director. The growing links would
also bear fruit in the 1990s, in the support that Cuban lmmakers found
in institutions like Robert Redfords Sundance Institute.
Fidel duly appeared at the closing session of the 1985 festival, and
spoke about his liking for cinemathe speech was a short one, only
forty-ve minutes. He gave little away on the level of personal taste,
 Return of the Popular 417

claiming simply to be one of those people who have been conquered

by the New Latin American Cinema, and thats what it should be called
a conquest, but he spoke of the problems of cultural imperialism. I
can imagine how much our writers and thinkers suer when they see
what happens in our countries, with this alienating system that operates
every day, at every hour of the day, through the screens. And where is
the majority of what we see produced, what we enjoy or try to enjoy?
Not in our own countries, not in Latin America. It was not only expen-
sive high technology, from aircraft to computers, that the underdevel-
oped countries were forced to purchase, along with all sorts of equip-
ment, merchandise, and industrial products, but we also import our
cinema, our television, our cultureor false culture! We experience
complete decadence and dont realise the extent to which we are sub-
jected to cultural colonisation.
For the rst time, the Hollywood trade journal Variety was in atten-
dance, and published reviews of the crop of new Cuban lms on show at
the festival. If they were not particularly impressed, neither was anyone
else, except by the fact that icaic was presenting ve new feature direc-
tors, some of whom enjoyed considerable success with Cuban audiences.
Una novia para David (A girlfriend for David) by Orlando Rojaswhich
was seen by eight hundred thousand people in its rst six weeksis an
aectionate, if visually dull, portrayal of life among college kids in Ha-
vana in the late 1960s. John King is unkind but not entirely incorrect to
compare it with a sophomore movie like Porkys (dir. Bob Clark, 1981),
as an example of a subgenre of raunchy, low-budget adolescent comedy.
From Luis Felipe Bernaza, De tal pedro, tal astilla (A chip o the old block)
is a ctional version of the same directors amusing documentary of
1980, Pedro cero por ciento (Pedro zero percent), about a dairy farmer on
a small cattle ranch in the province of Sancti Spiritus, who has not let a
single cow die in seven years. The ctional version has two rivals, driven
by socialist emulation, vying for top place. Parodying Cervantes and
Shakespeare at the same time, the lm shows young people, members of
rival families, who fall in love, to the great displeasure of their parents,
who end up in physical confrontation. This lm was even more popular,
but, however funny, it represented a highly idealized version of the con-
ditions in the Cuban countryside, a year before the farmers markets, in-
troduced in 1980, were closed down because of excessive proteering.36
Something similar is true of El corazn sobre la tierra (Heart across
 418 Return of the Popular

the land), by Constante Diego, which, according to Caballero and del Ro,
was classed by certain critics as the height of supposed Cuban socialist
realism. A father and son in Havana dream of starting a cooperative in
the far-o Sierra Maestra mountains, but when the son is killed in action
in Ethiopia, the father throws himself into the cause of the cooperative
with maniacal devotion. While Variety found it a predictable and quickly
tiresome tract designed to demonstrate how even independent-minded
roughnecks in the Cuban mountains can rally round the spirit of the
revolution, for the Cuban critics, the lm indicates the solidity of a social
project whose dramatic representation however, is misjudged. Jibaro
(Wild dog) by Daniel Daz Torres is set in the Escambray in the heroic
early days of the Revolution, where wily old peasants play their part in
the struggle against the counterrevolutionaries; the title is an obvious
metaphor for the reactionary elements that need killing o. Variety
called it a didactic modern-day Western lled with predictable action
and sentiment, but it made a respectable, if duly conventional, debut.
More interesting was Como la vida misma (Like life itself) by Vctor
Casaus, which marked the return to the Cuban cinema screen of Sergio
Corrieri. Corrieri, anxious to avoid becoming a typecast star, had left
the cinema to form a theater group in the Escambray, presenting to
countryside audiences with no experience of theater, plays collectively
written about their own concerns. The lm is a ctionalized account of
one of these productions, and thus presents a picture of the Escambray
very dierent from that of the genre movies. The subject is not the
economy of the countryside, however, but deciencies in the education
system admitted by the education minister, Jos Fernndez, the same
year the lm came out, and indicated by the statistics on cheating, which
went on in 34 percent of secondary schools.37 We are in a high school,
where an incident of cheating occurs, and the theater group decides to
make it the theme of the play. The cast consists of actors both profes-
sional and nonprofessional, and of personages both real and ctional,
in a mold now well established in Cuban cinema; but the lines are
crossed, and some of the professional actors, including Corrieri, repre-
sent not ctional characters but themselves. Variety calls the lm an
amiable comic drama . . . punctuated by sizeable helpings of lowbrow, but
frequently funny, comedy, but nds what it calls the subplot about
cheating uninvolving. This is to miss the point of a lm that sets out to
use the subplot to investigate the attitudes and beliefs of the new gener-
 Return of the Popular 419

ation growing up within the Revolution. In the school, the disciplinary

investigation of the incident runs parallel to the preparation of the pro-
duction, until an improvisation onstage gets too close to the bone, and
in a tense moment the culprit confesses. There is also a romantic sub-
plot and Casaus breaks up the narrative with disparate elements like
tape-recorded interviewsunfortunately, not always well integrated.
He has, nonetheless, in attempting to emulate Alea, come up with a lm
that is not moralistic, but, much more important, interrogative, and in
this respect more truly represents the self-questioning of imperfect cin-
ema than the genre celebrations of revolutionary bravery.
A couple more things might be said of this lm. First, it shows how
Cuban cinema learned to attune its vocation for social criticism by tak-
ing public admissions of problems and inserting them into dramatic
contexts. If the fate of Techo de vidrio, despite the problems raised by Fi-
del the same year it was made, suggests this was not always a strategy
that succeeded, Se permuta fared better by picking on a problem that
was already subject to wide comment, and, in making Como la vida
misma, it does Casaus no harm when cheating is admitted by the min-
ister in charge. Second, as a conceptually ambitious lm, it shows that
the demands of imperfect cinema are not an easy option; in fact, they
might well make a successful debut feature more dicult. But the result
is a lm that ags up a social problem that would only intensify over
the coming years, namely, the signs of malaise among the youth.
This left two new lms by the brothers Rolando and Jess Daz.
Rolandos En tres y dos is a baseball story that Variety called an intelli-
gent, sympathetic but poorly structured look at a top Cuban baseball
star who is forced to confront his retirement from the sport, but it was
put o by what it called some unique digressions by way of vintage
newsreel footage and contemporary interviews with athletic legends
like boxer Kid Chocolate and the runner Juantorena, and judged the
lm somewhat confusing even for baseball fans. If these digressions
are precisely the elements that dierentiate the lm from a Hollywood
biopic, the Cuban critic Rolando Prez Betancourt, himself a keen base-
ball fan who found the lm at certain points very moving, suspected it
was unintelligible for those who knew nothing about the sport. Some
comrades, he wrote, have asked me if its true that to see En tres y dos
you need to know about the game. At the 1985 lm festival, Gian Maria
Volont remarked that hed seen the lm, and he could tell it dealt with
 420 Return of the Popular

important matters, but not knowing baseball much of it was lost on

him, and the same thing happened to the members of the jury.38
Much more to Varietys liking was the other brothers Lejana, the
rst local feature to deal with the issue of Cuban exiles returning to the
island for visits with relatives, and the most ambitious and controver-
sial of the Cuban lms unspooled at the 1985 festival. In the journals
inimitable language, Although pic would be restricted by its nature to
select and specialized houses, its creative virtues and US-related subject
matter are such that it deserves some limited commercial playo in ad-
dition to international fest slottings.39 A man and his family are re-
united with his mother and his cousin and childhood playmate. A Cuban
exile (Vernica Lynn) returns to Havana from Miami with her niece
(Isabel Santos) to visit the son she left behind (Jorge Trinchet) and his
wife (Beatriz Valds). Enclosed within the space of an apartment in the
Havana district of Vedado, with its rooftop overlooking the city, and in
the time span of a couple of days, a woman who abandoned her teenage
sonbecause boys approaching military age were not allowed to leave
for the good life in the United States, returns trailing guilt and suit-
cases stued with gifts in a vain attempt to reclaim him. The trauma of
families divided by the revolution, a theme that Jess Daz had tackled
twice before, is here given a contemporary setting that entirely casts
aside the dimensions of the epic to home in, like a play by Chekov, on
half a dozen characters.
Daz uses the spatial texture of the apartment to reveal the distances
that separate his characters on various dierent levelspolitical, psy-
chological, and cultural. Reinaldos mother Susana, whom even Variety
describes as a middle-aged woman of deep-rooted bourgeois tastes, is
puzzled by the bare furnishings; when she asks why the coee isnt served
in the cups she was given on her wedding, Reinaldo replies, Who re-
members that? Aleida, his wife, tells her that after she left, Reinaldo
sold o the contents bit by bitclothes, furniture, decorations. As Susana
euses nostalgia for her former homeand for a Cuba that now only
exists in her mindthe apartment becomes a symbolic mise-en-scne
that Reinaldo has tried to empty of memories and where his mother
now appears to him like a ghostwhom he addresses throughout her
visitation, even after her objections, not as t but with the formal Usted.
Variety remarks that the photographer Mario Garca Joyas very mobile
 Return of the Popular 421

lensing in the tight quarters is superior. Indeed, the camera circles the
characters, follows them down corridors, peers through half-open doors,
with a uidity all the more astonishing when you know that this is a
handheld camera without a steadycam. Garca JoyaMayitoapplied
the wiliness of imperfect cinema to the skills of cinematography; a steady-
cam was an impossible luxury, so he devised a simple wooden pole with
a crosspiece at the top of exactly the right height on which to rest the
handheld camera when he was standing still; his camera assistant slid it
into place when he wanted the camera to come to rest, and took it away
when he wanted to move again. (A year or so later, shooting a copro-
duction in ColombiaJorge Al Trianas Tiempo de morirwithout
the luxury of camera tracks, he stripped down an old Deux Chevaux to
make a dolly that could ride smoothly down a poorly maintained street.)
The intensely naturalistic feel achieved by the use of available light is
intensied by the direct location sound; if the lm never feels claustro-
phobic, this is largely because of the constant presence on the sound
track of the world outside, mostly unobtrusive but unobscured by back-
ground music. Nearly all the music in the lm, except for the theme song
over the credits, is diegetic and acousmatic: it comes from the tele-
vision, the radio, and the stereo that Susana has brought from Miami. It
is the everyday music of the contemporary world of the lm, which be-
comes an ironic intertext because it reveals the presence of the past in
the cultural substrate in a manner that intertwines public and private
memories. Thus cousin Ana, left alone for the rst time with Reinaldo,
turns on the television to discover a popular black entertainer she doesnt
recognize singing an old-style ballad she doesnt know, but which in her
present situation she nds intensely sad; it is the singer Omara Por-
tuondo and the lms theme song, Veinte aos atrs (Twenty years
ago), about the separation of two lovers and the impossibility of rekin-
dling their love: I was the illusion in your life a long time ago, I repre-
sent the past, I cannot be consoled. (With gentle self-mockery, it is
immediately followed by a snatch of Carlos Gardel singing his most
famous tango and the very epitome of nostalgia: Volver [Return].)
Congured in the song are both the unbridgeable separation of the exile
from their country and the personal separation between the cousins; and
if they start by fooling around like children, they end up in an embrace
with distinctly erotic overtones. Indeed, when Aleida comes back later
 422 Return of the Popular

in the day to nd a television set left on and a rumpled bed, she is pre-
pared to think the worst, momentarily revealing the Cuban womans
constitutional suspicion of the Cuban man.
From time to time, the camera stays or comes to halt on blank sur-
faces: a blank page in a photograph album where the family photos ran
out; the plain white wall; the TV screen that Susana impetuously turns
o because it is showing one of those propaganda lmsit is, in fact,
a scene from Aleas La ltima cena. How should we read these blank
frames? Susana has brought with her an 8 mm home movie of the fam-
ily in Florida. They close the blinds and project the jerky and of course
silent lm on the wall. Brief images of a comfortable American subur-
bia peopled by a big happy family are followed by an old man silently
mouthing the words that she has brought separately on tapethe fa-
thers last message to his son. Reinaldo left alone in the at, ries through
the suitcases, tries on this or that, mockingly plugs a hair dryer into his
ear in a shot in front of a mirror that pointedly evokes another of Aleas
lms, the scene of Sergio Corrieri in Memorias del subdesarrollo playing
with the appurtenances his wife left behind when she left for the States
an allusion through which Daz not only declares allegiance to Aleas
type of cinema but lays claim to a history of representation in which the
Cuban cinema viewer may discover the traces of what may not be openly
spoken, but about which it is not possible to remain silent. Late at night,
after a row with Aleida, Reinaldo listens to his fathers tape. The cassette
player, the blank television screen, and the seated listener are silhouet-
ted against the blank wall, in a paradoxical image whose composition
seems deliberately unpictorial, and both empty and full at the same
time. It is as if memory itself is desynchronized.
Western viewers, says Variety, will be amazed by the didence with
which Reinaldo is able to treat his mother, and perhaps a bit appalled at
the manner in which American values are exclusively tied to material
possessions. If so, they would be falling into a well-prepared trap. As
Daz explained to Cine Cubano, the gifts from Florida become an ethi-
cal touchstone by exposing the various attitudes of dierent members
of the family, from gleeful acceptance to cutting rejection, thus con-
fronting the viewer with the problem of which character to identify
with.40 As a narrative device, this works with any audience, but dier-
ently for Cuban viewers, as Variety seems to be aware, even if it balks at
the central metaphor in which Susana oers Reinaldo a world of mate-
 Return of the Popular 423

rial riches in exchange for the emotional succor she took away from
him. The perversion of motherly love in the service of the dehumaniz-
ing culture of consumerism becomes, in Cuba, a mark of perverse com-
plicity with an ideology that places wasteful materialism above natural
human feeling. The eect is to place at the center of the lm a metaphor
of the double-sided condition that divides the rst world and the third,
the two faces of deprivation, emotional in one, material in the other.
From Ana, however, Reinaldo learns that the loss he suered may
well be no less than hers, in being dragged away from her country, her
culture. When the two of them emerge into the daylight for the rst time,
halfway through the lm, onto the roof of the house with its panorama
of the city, Anas eyes become tearful as she recites for him a poem
about exile by the Cuban-American poet Lourdes Casal (to whom Daz
has dedicated the lm), recounting the feeling of being a stranger in the
city where you live, and a foreigner when you go back to the city of
your infancy: Demasiado habanera para ser neoyorquina / Demasiada
neoyorquina para ser / Aun volver a sercualquier otra cosa (Too
much of an Habanera to be a New Yorker, too much a New Yorker to be,
even go back to being, anything else). This quiet moment, the insertion
of the voice of Otherness, is perhaps the heart of the lm, a moment
wrenched out of division, disruption, and hostility, which accomplishes
the humanization of the estranged.
Daz has claimed, with justice, that Lejana is one of the few lms of
the day that dares to treat a really complex and controversial subject,
and, moreover, does it without teque [political rhetoric], without exter-
nal abuse of the ideological, without even showing the work of the Revo-
lution explicitly, that is to say, without falling back on the achievements
of the Revolution as counters in the moral and emotional debate that
the lm represents.41 This was to make many viewers on both sides of
the divide quite uncomfortable. Variety commended Daz for tackling
such a politically sensitive and tricky subject in such a forthright man-
ner, but felt that he ended up painting a devastating and exceedingly
bleak picture of the possibilities of any reconciliation between mother
and son, and, by extension, between the two countries. The reviewer
also picked up on the problematic reception of the lm in Cuba, report-
ing that, ironically, Daz has been attacked by certain quarters in his
native country for trading as extensively as he does in ambiguities, or
simply for suggesting that there are some Cubans ready to be seduced
 424 Return of the Popular

by the supposedly supercial attractions of decadent American soci-

ety. These include the gure of Reinaldos uncle, Jacinto, a bureaucrat and
terrible opportunist, who, despite his revolutionary credentials, is pre-
sented as morally on a par with Susana. But others, instead of attacking
the lm, ignored it. One review even drew attention to the phenomenon,
under the title Algunos preeren callarse (Some prefer to keep quiet),
in parody of the Spanish title of Some Like It Hot, (Algunos preeren
quemarse).

The fate of Lejana raises the general problem of lm criticism in Cuba.

This inevitably raises the question of the relation of icaic and its lm-
makers to the critics, and the critics relation to the press and the public.
This in turn brings us back to the question of icaics role in the trans-
formation of the public sphere in Cuba following the Revolution. By the
1970s, the relations between the various social actors had become dis-
tinctly asymmetrical. The lmmakers occupied a public space more priv-
ileged than the press, enjoying a direct popular appeal of their own, as
well as the soft regime of the Ministry of Culture compared to the super-
vision of the hard-liners in the ideological oce of the central commit-
tee. The press was necessarily cautious, inclined toward ambivalence in
making judgments, sometimes even to reproof; the Institute found the
press frequently unhelpful.
Julianne Burton has suggested that icaic was always leery of profes-
sional critics and therefore decided early on to assume the critics task
itself by creating the journal Cine Cubano.42 If it is true that many Cuban
lmmakers believed the exercise of criticism to be a responsibility of
the lmmaker, not to be left to journalists and literati, the journal was
also an expression of the same imperative that guided the creation of
lm magazines throughout Latin America wherever a nucleus of lm-
makers committed to the new cinema movement took root: a magazine
was a declaration of existence, a claim for attention, an instrument in
the construction of an identity. Publications of this kind tend to share
with the lms of the movement they belong to many of the same arti-
sanal qualities, and are devoted more to championing a cause and dis-
seminating positions than traditional forms of critical reection. Cine
Cubano set new standards in the service of propagation and the educa-
tion of its readership, and showed its spirit in its own distinctive mod-
ern typography and design. Abroad, the magazine became a primary
 Return of the Popular 425

source of information about Cuban and the new Latin American cin-
ema in general. At home, the readership included the expanding circle
of critics at a time when their numbers were growing, with more space
to ll in a press transformed by the Revolution.
In this way Cine Cubano quickly took on its primary function, be-
coming a cross between a house magazine and a journal of record, with
background material on new and upcoming lms together with inter-
views with leading Cuban, Latin American, and other lmmakers and
the like. The dominant discourse was that of the lmmakers, their inten-
tions, desires, hopes, explanations, and theoretical formations, often of
a sociological character. The newspapers were left with the job of review-
ing new releases, with other journals carrying interviews and background
pieces. No longer quite the same as what Brecht once called copywriting
for the entertainment industry, nevertheless the predominant stance
among many of the newspaper critics tended toward political conform-
ism dressed up in sometimes orid aesthetic appraisal; there was little
attempt to elucidate possible metaphorical and subtextual readings of
the lms, especially when these might reveal a critical angle. As well
as publishing Cine Cubano, icaics solution to this situation was to
take on the task of animating a wider sense of lm culture in the general
audience, bypassing the critics and reaching out directly to the public
through television, employing a couple of specialists for the purpose.
Carlos Galiano, who also wrote reviews in Granma, hosted weekly screen-
ings under the title History of Cinema, and Enrique Colina presented
the prime-time Twenty-Four Frames a Second, one of the most popular
programs on Cuban television, an intelligent viewers guide to current
and new cinema from around the world.
Colina turned lmmaker in the 1980s with a series of shorts whose
humor made him one of the most distinctive experimentalists of the
decade. As Paranagua puts it, he succeeded in getting the most conven-
tional kind of documentary, the didactic lm, to implode with a dose of
corrosive humour.43 Colinas targets range from the misadventures of
consumers in Cubas counterconsumption society, to productivity and
carelessness, by way of the irritating habits of ones neighbors. Esttica
(Aesthetics) satirizes the vagaries of popular taste, Vecinos exposes noise-
makers. His style is one of tightly edited free association of observed
scenes, interviews, lm clips and apposite songs on the sound track.
Chapuceras (Sloppy work), a critique of negligence in the fulllment of
 426 Return of the Popular

work goalsPlease excuse the sloppy work, weve surpassed our work
planpresents itself as a self-reexive documentary that crosscuts the
investigation with the editors at the editing table sloppily putting to-
gether this very lm and even, at the end, trying to nd a suitable con-
clusion. This is a mode of lmmaking that surpasses easy labeling. When
is a documentary not a documentary? And yet not to be considered as
ction, because its characters are not inventedthey are gente con
nombre y apellido, people with their own rst and second name.
Burton, writing in the mid-1980s, blamed the principle articulated by
Garca Espinosa in 1970imperfect cinema rejects whatever services
criticism has to oer and considers the function of mediators and inter-
mediaries anachronisticfor holding Cine Cubano back, since largely
as a result of such attitudes the magazine did not keep pace with the
explosion of theoretical and methodological inquiry in the eld of lm
studies over the past two decades.44 But then Cine Cubano was neither
an academic journal nor ever intended to be, and the intellectual focus
for such studies in Cuba lay elsewhere, catered for by critical journals
like Temas and educational publishing houses that issued translations
of Russian semiologists like Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, when
they were still little known in Western Europe and North America. On
the other hand, Burton is correct to say that while the presentation of
cinema on television was remarkably sophisticated, its print counter-
part remained deplorably limited. In a word, the critical function did
not recover from the conformism imposed on the media during the
gray years of the early 1970s. The critic merely passed from a condition
of crude ideological orthodoxy to a state of timidity, especially when
confronted with a lm that addressed a topic surrounded with taboos.
Jess Daz was not wrong to complain that critics who do not express
an opinion are simply not fullling their function. It is disconcerting
that there have sometimes been calls for cinema to treat the complex
problems of our reality, our ideological struggle, and when this happens
theres nothing, a culpable silence.45

The changes introduced in icaic by Garca Espinosa entered a new

phase after the middle of the decade, in the search for a response to a
situation of growing contradictions, both internally and externally. Cuba
in the 1980s had not yet fully escaped the economic legacy of its past. It
had not achieved the economic diversication for which Che Guevara
 Return of the Popular 427

and others had argued in the 1960s. Membership of the Soviet trading
bloc, Comecon, brought huge advantages: for example, what the Soviet
Union paid for Cuban sugar was way above the market price, an adjust-
ment that the West called subsidy while the Communists called it a re-
versal of the unequal terms of trade imposed by the core capitalist coun-
tries on the third world. But, as the economist Carlos Tablada wrote in a
book that won the Casa de las Amricas prize in 1987, two nations can
proceed to trade with each other in such a way that both benet, even
though one exploits and constantly robs the other; and thus the more
developed socialist countries can contribute to the development of de-
pendent countries while they also participate, to a greater or lesser degree,
in their exploitation.46 Remarks like this would have been impossible in
public only a few years earlier. On this reading, a combination of Soviet-
style economic centralization and the historic eects of underdevelop-
mentin short, continuing dependency on two or three principal cash
crops (sugar, tobacco, and coee)eectively held back Cubas further
development. A fall in world sugar prices that began in 1982 had a seri-
ous impact on its economy. By the mid-1980s, the economy was slowing
down seriously enough to occasion austerity measures. By the end of
the decade, the icaic newsreel was reporting the terrible eects pro-
duced, for example, by breakdowns in public transport in Havana, or
the citys housing crisis.
In Tabladas view, one kind of dependency turned into another, and
produced new ineciencies; these aected icaic in much the same
way as everyone else. In 1987, while making a television documentary
on the economic and political situation in Cuba, the present writer
lmed a textile factory in Santiago de Cuba that was operating at only
43 percent of capacity, partly because of problems in the supply of raw
materials, some of which came from the Soviet Union and East Ger-
many.47 At the same time, icaic was suering holdups at the laborato-
ries through lack of lm stock from the same sources, which they used
for work copies and prints. (For reasons of quality, features were shot
on Eastman Kodak, ocially unavailable because of the American block-
ade but obtainable in other countries through friends.) In a word, the
economy was underproducing. Yet despite such problems, the same thing
could be said of Cuba that, according to Eric Hobsbawm, was true of
Soviet communism. For most Soviet citizens, the Brezhnev era was not
one of stagnation, but the best times they, their parents, and their grand-
 428 Return of the Popular

parents had ever known. The system provided a guaranteed livelihood

and comprehensive social security at a modest but real level, a socially
and economically egalitarian society and at least one of the traditional
aspirations of socialism, Paul Lafargues Right to Idleness.48 In short,
the system adapted, and a certain form of underemployment became
institutionalized. In the Cuban context, Hobsbawms invocation of Marxs
son-in-law, one of the founders of the French communist movement, is
especially apt. As Garca Espinosa once pointed out to me with ironic
patriotism, Lafargue was born in Santiago de CubaMarx once casu-
ally referred in a letter to his mulatto bloodand, from a Cuban point
of view, was only articulating a very Cuban attitude.
In 1985, a passionate reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power as
general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and with the new
watchwords of perestroika and glasnost, restructuring and openness, the
whole Soviet bloc was thrown into intense debate about an agenda for
the transformation of the communist state that, as Hobsbawm reminds
us, had in fact been brewing for a good while.49 In Cuba, over the next
few years, Soviet aairs were followed with a surprising passion that
made the weekly Moscow News a best-seller, while audiences battled to
get into the cinemas to see previously banned lms like Tengiz Abuladzes
Repentance of 1984. Amid this heady atmosphere, the imperative need
at icaic was for some kind of internal reorganization to cope with an
increase in production, since it was one thing for everyone to agree to
restrict their budgets in order to get more lms made, another to prop-
erly supervise their making. But the new ideological climate, in which
the campaign of recticacin (rectication) that Castro launched at the
end of 1986 was initially seen as the Cuban counterpart to perestroika,
opened up a space that, in theory, extended the range of thinkable solu-
tions beyond the orthodox, and in the case of icaic, did so in practice.
Perestroika and recticacin would turn out rather dierently. Pere-
stroika sought to address the need for fundamental economic and polit-
ical transformations, in the process unleashing forces that would prove
uncontrollable. Castro spoke merely of rectifying errors and negative
tendencies in all spheres of society in a battle against economic ine-
ciency and the growth of social inequalities. Garca Espinosa treated
perestroika and rectication in practical terms as the same, and took o
to Moscow to investigate the approach of the new head of the Soviet
lm industry, Elem Klimov. The trip conrmed him in the conviction
 Return of the Popular 429

that Cuba had no cause to follow other models, but needed a home-
made solution of its own. The ideala series of independent studios or
production houseswas impossible with Cubas lack of resources; on
the other hand, icaic was too large to function as eciently as it might.
His answer was to devolve control over the production process to three
creative groups (grupos de creacin), with their own programs of pro-
duction, which they supervised themselves from beginning to end.
In his own account, the grupos de creacin answered to several imper-
atives, including the lack of experienced executive producers, a role that
in icaic was eectively fullled by the head of production. When he
had occupied this position himself in the 1960s, at a time when icaic
was only producing three or four features a year, he had also occupied
the role of executive producer, but this could hardly be considered viable
for a single person when there were eight or nine lms a year to deal
with. Moreover, times had changed, and it was no longer possible for a
single person to exercise a historical authority in this way. In a capi-
talist lm industry, the executive producer had the clear function of
molding the lm and controlling the budget in the interests of nancial
success. In Cuba, the aims were dierent. Instead of slavery to the mar-
ket, the objective was to try and conciliate quality and communica-
tion; in other words, a question of a certain cultural politics. Who, he
asked, should fulll this function of being the trustees of icaics poli-
tics if not the lmmakers themselves? Better lmmakers than func-
tionaries.50 Not only would the groups form a more democratic inter-
nal structure that guarded against arbitrary decisions being handed
down from on high. At the same time, by giving each group control
over its own production program, the arrangement would allow a more
exible approach to resourcing, and thus an expanded production pro-
gram. Under the existing system, planning was governed by ocial work
norms, which, rather like union rules under capitalism, would determine
such considerations as the ocial size of the lm crew, whether the di-
rector needed them or not; the new groups would be able to shift these
norms around to suit the needs of the lm. If production increased as a
result, it would be to everyones benet.
Finally, and by no means least, the scheme beneted from allowing
for association on the basis of personal allegiances. The three groups,
which were set up in 1987, were headed by Manuel Prez, Humberto Sols,
and Toms Gutirrez Alea. They soon became known aectionately as
 430 Return of the Popular

los rojos, los rosados, and los verdes (reds, pinks, and greens), respec-
tivelya joke with a strong dose of popular wisdom in it. Although the
categories should not be applied too strictly to individuals, it is no acci-
dent if this color scheme suggests a triangulation to be found within
icaic in the late 1980s, in both aesthetic predilection and political ten-
dency, where red is the color of political orthodoxy and populism, pink
of sexual libertarianism and visual stylistics, and green of radicalism
and imperfect cinema.
The dominant trends to begin with were the red and the pink. In
Clandestinos, Fernando Prez conformed to pattern for his eective de-
but feature with a genre exercise directed at the youth audience. Based
on historical events but with ctional characters, with a well-crafted
script by Jess Daz, the story concerns the life of a group of young
people involved in the clandestine struggle against Batista in the 1950s.
Solid, well paced, and atmospheric, it is described by the director as a
love story in the context of the underground struggleit was not my
intention to make a historical lm, although we were inspired by real
facts, but to deal with themes to be found throughout history like love
and death. Sols, meanwhile, pursued the critique of historical specta-
cle with Un hombre de xito, a lm in which for the rst time since Un
da de noviembre he focused on a male rather than a female progatonist.
A study in opportunism, a chronicle of the moral decline of the bour-
geoisie over three decades from the 1930s to the eve of the Revolution,
seen through the lives of two brothers separated by ideology and ambi-
tion, what most impressed the critics was the opulent mise-en-scne,
which gave the lm the impression of a superproduction and garnered
much praise for icaics art directors, set dressers, and costumiers, and
especially Livio Delgados cinematography, which, as Prez Betancourt
put it, seems to leave nothing to chance.51 There was much more talk
about what the same critic called those long shots whichthrough
the architecture, decor, and the most varied details of the ambience
capture the whole personality of an epoch. If this calls forth compari-
son, as with previous lms by Sols, with Visconti, the lm is much
more than a stylistic exercise. Sols is clearly more interested in the am-
bience than the politics, which is treated fairly schematically, and uses
the Viscontiesque camera to scrutinize the pose the bourgeoisie con-
structs for itself in the privacy of its own domain. As a result, the lm is
less a political allegory than a commentary on historical complacence,
 Return of the Popular 431

although it also elicited comments about the way Sols was using his-
tory to make references to the presentif no one said exactly what this
consisted of, it seemed obvious enough. In 1986, a vice minister had ab-
sconded to Spain with half a million dollars; to this, by the time the lm
was premiered, must be added the defection to the United States of an
air force general, the arrest on corruption charges of the president of
the civil aviation institute, and a couple more defectionsa sequence
of events that revealed the reappearance in the ruling echelons of phe-
nomena that had disappeared in the rst years of the revolution.52
An independence of spirit also fed the monthly newsreel, which pur-
sued the public criticism of political issues more single-mindedly than
either television or the press. There were newsreels on topics like food
shortages, the high marriage and divorce rate, and religious practice. In
Jos Padrns investigation of the state of Havanas public transport sys-
tem in Newsreel No. 1403 (Transporte Popular [Public transport], 1988),
a bus driver complains of a report in Granma charging that drivers were
lax, and often failed to turn up on time for duty, when the truth was
that dozens of buses were standing idle in the depot for want of spare
parts, or they could only take them out for half the length of their roster
because the engines quickly overheated. A year later, Padrn reported
on the citys housing crisis in Los albergados (Hostel-dwellers, Newsreel
No. 1460, 1989), exposing the reality of a situation that most broadcast-
ers and journalists preferred not to deal with. The camera takes us on a
tour of hostels, which housed less than seven thousand of the more
than sixty-ve thousand Habaneros who ocially qualied for hostel
accommodation due to the deteriorated state of their dwellings. The
commentary explains that the provision of adequate housing is a task
beyond the capacity of the microbrigades, the voluntary construction
teams composed of ordinary workers seconded from their own work-
place that originated in the 1960s but were later run down. The camera
takes direct testimony from a number of occupants: a worker lamenting
the eects on family life when children live with their mothers while the
men are housed separately; a schoolgirl who never brings her friends
home; a young woman with a babe in arms who admits that she and
her husband have to go out to nd some secluded place to make love.
Shot with a mobile handheld camera, the director adopts the role of
on-screen reporter questioning participants, and the commentary takes
on a critical tone. In the space of eleven minutes, the traditional news-
 432 Return of the Popular

reel length of one 35 mm reel, these are individually crafted investigative

documentary shorts in the best tradition created by Santiago lvarez.
In style, tone, and mode of address, they become essays in politically
responsible personal authorship. Los albergados ends with an ocial
admitting that at the present rate of construction, the problem will not
be solved until the year 2001, whereupon the sound track, in ironic allu-
sion to the lm by Stanley Kubrick, brings in the famous opening mea-
sures of Also Sprach Zarathustra over a nal montage of miserable
dwellings. In another edition (Ro Almendares, Newsreel No. 1435, 1990),
Padrn interrogates the pollution along the Almendares River, which
runs into the sea along Havanas northern coast, between Vedado and
Miramar. Here the language of the commentary is unequivocal. Those
mainly responsible for the fact that so many years after the Revolution
there are people still living in shacks and shantytowns along the river
are the technocratic managers of the 1970s who opposed the micro-
brigades with a neocapitalist concept of planning that failed to take ac-
count of the social needs of the majority of the people. A popular band
performs a satirical song about the pollution of the Almendares, an
informant reveals the insucient capacity of the water purication
works, bathers complain that the river mouth is so contaminated they
cant go swimming, and the band patrolling the beach dressed in anti-
pollution gear brings the lm to an end in the style of a pop video.

Another element in Garca Espinosas strategy was to continue the pol-

icy of international coproduction, mostly with Latin America, which
began at the end of the 1970s with two lms by exiled Chilean directors
(Sergio Castillas Prisioneros desaparecidos of 1979, and La viuda de Mon-
tiel by Miguel Littin in 1980), a policy that contributed signicantly to
the ow of new lms. Between 1981 and 1987 there were as many as six-
teen such projects, that is, more than a third of icaics total produc-
tion over the same period.53 The directors included another Chilean,
Patricio Guzmn, the Peruvians Federico Garca and Alberto Durant,
the Colombian Jorge Al Triana, and the veteran Argentinean Fernando
Birri.54 Generally the lms were shot outside Cuba with Cuban person-
nel in the crew and postproduction in Cuba, although Guzmn and
Birri shot on location outside Havana. In both cases, however, the place
represented on screen was not Cuba but somewhere in Latin America,
and quite possibly the lack of specicity contributes to a kind of vague-
 Return of the Popular 433

ness in the two lms, which both aim for a kind of mythical and magical-
that realist Latin American universalism that is less than fully convinc-
ing. The end of the decade also saw a new trend, with three international
coproductions in 1988 directed by Cubans. Manuel Herreras Capablanca
had the ussr as partner; Gallego by Manuel Octavio Gmez was the
rst coproduction with Spain; and Aleas Cartas del parque (Letters
from the park) was one of six adaptations by dierent Latin American
directors of stories by Gabriel Garca Mrquez made for European tele-
vision. The rst was a prosaic biography of the Cuban chess player. The
second, based on a book by Miguel Barnet, and with excellent acting by
Francisco Rabal, failed to live up to its promise; it was the directors last
lm (Gmez died in 1988). The last, a love story set in the Cuban town
of Matanzas in 1913, caused consternation among critics who felt that
Alea had somehow betrayed his principles by making an entirely apolit-
ical lm. Alea himself explained, The story takes place in Matanzas
City, a hundred kilometers east of Havana, in 1913. Two lovers enlist the
services of the same scribeeach of their own accord, and without the
others knowledgeto transmit their feelings to their beloved in letters
the scribe pens for them. However, little by little, the scribes own feel-
ings prevail, much against his will, and reveal an eternal truth: love can-
not be tricked.55
Miguel Barnets novel Cancin de Rachel also provided the source for
a lm the following year, La bella del Alhambra (The belle of the Al-
hambra) directed by the writers cousin Enrique Pineda Barnet, which
brings to life the atmosphere of the Havana theater world of the 1920s
in which a chorus girl dreams of becoming a star at the Alhambra; the
cost of her ambition, however, which includes sleeping with the theaters
owner, drives her lover to suicide. A celebration of a controversial period
in Cuban musical culture, Pineda Barnet intended the lma little too
obviously perhapsas an allegory on the republic, which prostituted
itself to foreign capital in the name of higher aspirations. A melodrama
that incorporates musical numbers but is not exactly a musical, La bella
del Alhambra was both a popular and a critical success, especially for
Beatriz Valds as Rachel, who was praised for her combination of in-
genuousness, frivolity, grace, timidity, and a certain eroticized malice.56
It was also the rst Cuban lm to be nominated for an Oscar. Less suc-
cessful lms in the same year included Pastor Vegas En el aire (In the
air), Luis Felipe Bernazas Vals de La Habana Vieja (Waltz of Old
 434 Return of the Popular

Havana), and La vida en rosa (A rosy life) by Rolando Daz. Ironically,

all three deal with contemporary subjects. The rst takes a young
university-trained journalist to confront the daily reality of a small radio
station in the countryside; the second is a social comedy that satirizes
the tradition of los quince, the coming-out party for fteen-year-old
girls; the third is an absurdist comedy, in which a group of young peo-
ple encounter their future selves as old people, and are forced to con-
front the question of personal values. Its an interesting experiment. As
Paranagua puts it, Daz imagined a dramaturgical solution diametri-
cally opposed to the usual schema: instead of a retrospective narration
using ashbacks, his young characters are projected into the future, see-
ing themselves as old, as they will become . . . unless they manage to
change their destinies.57 The lm has magical moments but suers from
an unavoidable hole in the premise, the projection of a world emptied of
history, in which nothing external has changed between the present day
of the young people and that of their older selves, an inevitable lapse
that unfortunately robs it of credibility. One other lm of 1989 deserves
mention: Garca Espinosas La intil muerte de mi socio Manolo (The
useless death of my buddy Manolo), adapted from a play by Eugenio
Hernndez, is a two-hander about an encounter between two men,
youthful friends in the heroic days of the Revolution who now have very
dierent perspectives on life and politics. In pursuit as ever of radical
low-budget ecacy, the lm is shot in a studio, eschewing a naturalistic
mise-en-scne in favor of an open set and a uid camera, tightly fram-
ing the two actors, Mario Balmaseda and Pedro Renteria, who respond
with performances of great intensity. A lm that touches on private dis-
illusionment, to hint at a more metaphorical malaise.
Caballero and del Ro, looking back on the period, raise the question
of whether Cuban cinema in the 1980s succumbed after all to the pre-
cepts of socialist realism. In a decade anked by the events of Mariel
and the collapse of European communism, they say, Cuban cinema opted
for the illustration of a general catalog of social life in Cuba. There were
workers lms (like Hasta cierto punto), youth movies (like Una novia
para David), urban comedies (Se permuta), rural comedies (De tal pedro,
tal astilla), dramas about professionals (Habanera), in short, the rule of
a preconception, dear to socialist realism, that the work of art must be
conceived in terms of an all-embracing generality; a generality, how-
ever, that impedes the visualization of signicant and symptomatic de-
 Return of the Popular 435

tail in favor of a condescending amalgam of references, resulting in lms

whose only and doubtful success rests on occasional, shallow commu-
nication with the large public. Unfortunately, they say, this link with
the public dominates the aesthetic elaboration, subordinates the prin-
ciple of authorship, [and] the lms end up too contingent and hence
pedestrian, of meager conceptual level, lifeless, skin-deep, when what
was needed was a way of exposing the entropy of certain totalitarian
discourses. In spite of intermittent signs of the diculties and contra-
dictions within contemporary Cuban society, these lms, they say,
avoided taking risks, falling back on well-known but debatable features
of cubanidadexpressions, jokes, prejudiceswithout demonstrating
a genuinely critical point of view; they opted instead for vulgarity and
peripheric folklorism. Some directors embarked on a problematizing
cinema that was more clearly articulated, but where the treatment of
dicult edges of reality was limited to sketching out a certain disfunc-
tionality; the lmmakers boldly entered a terrain mined with years of
silence, but the impulse gave way to a simple schematicism that crippled
them, and kept them from achieving half of what they aimed at (here
they include such titles as Lejana, Techo de vidrio, and En el aire).
This article, published in 1995, marks a signal new departure in Cuban
lm criticism. Here for the rst time in print are opinions that had been
circulating orally for some time, raising serious questions about the
direction and achievements of Cuban cinema in its most recent phase.
We shall come back to the question of what made this critical devel-
opment possible, but whatever the justice of this harsh critique, there
were three lms in the late 1980s that, for dierent reasons, stand out,
free of these strictures. In 1986, Juan Padrons cartoon feature Vampiros
en la Habana (Vampires in Havana) provided unalloyed delight. It is
nicely described in Varietys telegraphese: amusing sendup of gangster
and vampire pictures recalling something of the raunchy irreverent spirit
if not the style of Fritz the Cat. Bubbling brew of a plot has leading
vampire members of the international maa converging on Havana, circa
1933, to try to lay their hands on a new invention called Vampisol, a po-
tion that allows vampires to survive in sunlight. . . . Everything is played
in delightfully broad caricature. Animation style is crude but witty, and
director-writer-designer has slipped in lots of sly pokes at gangster and
vampire mythology, the Machado dictatorship, tourists and morally
slack musicians . . . , a lively, bawdy eort . . . , this is certainly not the
 436 Return of the Popular

sort of lm one expects to be produced by a state controlled lm indus-

try. (Of course, it depends who the one is, and which is the state.) To
which can be added the comments of a twelve-year-old girl, the daughter
of an American mother and a Cuban father, in a conversation with the
present writer after the lms premiere: The European vampires want
the formula for the benet of all the vampires in Europe, and the vam-
pires in the United States want to destroy it so it wont ruin their busi-
ness, which is underground beaches. Thats why at the end, Pepito, the
hero, tells all the vampires what the formula is, so everybody can have
it. It was like the Europeans and the North Americans trying to get the
most out of Cuba, which is what really happened in history. And be-
cause the lm is about vampires, I would say that Cuba was the blood,
and the Europeans and North Americans were the vampires trying to
suck the blood.
There was also nothing timid about Juan Carlos Tabos Pla! o de-
masiado miedo a la vida of 1988 (Pla!, or Too Much Fear of Life), an
anarchic comedy that caught the eye of foreign reviewers and was hailed
by Variety as the best Cuban lm this decade: From the minute the
projector rolls, said the Hollywood journal, it is obvious Pla! is an
original venture. Others found it a quirky, funny lm . . . packed with
surprises . . . vigorously played by a cast led by the magnicent [Daisy]
Granados; and a raucous contemporary satire which lampoons all
things Cuban from the socialist bureaucracy to santera.58 Not unex-
pectably, some Cuban critics found the lm disconcerting, but audiences
loved it (John King reports that the cinema where I saw the lm in
Havana was in hilarious uproar throughout the screening59). The ono-
matopoeic title refers to the sound of an egg hitting the wall of a house.
Concha (Daisy Granados), is a widow with a nervous disposition and a
follower of Santera, who shares her house with her athletic son and his
brainy, modern-minded wife Clarita (Thas Valds). Concha, consumed
by resentment against her dead husband for his indelities, unable to
get along with anyone, even Toms, the patient widower who is courting
her, nds herself under attack: someone is pelting the house with eggs,
and the saints are of no help in nding the culprit. The mystery inten-
sies, as every time Concha thinks she knows who it is and confronts
them, another egg is thrown, driving her ever more distraught. A paral-
lel plot has Clarita, a biochemist, in conict with the shortsightedness
of the bureaucrats who run the laboratory where she works: she has
 Return of the Popular 437

invented a new polymer that would save the country money, but that
they fail to put into production because, as she complains, it wasnt
planned, so it cant be done. To make matters worse, her polymer is
made with pig droppings, and when she wins a prize for innovation,
jurisdiction is claimed by another organization, the idie, or Institute
for the Development and Investigation of Excrement; this twist not only
allows for some very funny lines but marks the introduction of the scat-
ological into the Cuban lm comedy.
As DLugo observes, Pla! is a parody on those lms that allegorize
the nation through their female characters. In this comic reduction of
the nations problems to the conict between mothers and daughters-in-
law, Concha embodies the revolutionary values of the 1960s, Clarita is a
representative of a younger generation that sees the waste and ineci-
ency of twenty years later as the result precisely of people like Concha, a
variation on the theme of generational conict entirely characteristic of
the genre of critical social comedy to which this lm belongs. Tabo uses
this double structure to take potshots at jealous mothers-in-law, the
superstitions of Santera, the Cuban housing shortage, attitudes to race,
sex, family, bureaucracyand the very process of lmmaking. The story
is told inside out, starting, as it were, in the middle: an opening credit,
announcing that the lm has been nished in record time in order to
have it ready for Filmmakers Day, gives way to an upside-down image,
whereupon the projectionist calls out that something is wrong with the
rst reel, hell send it back to icaic, and begin with the second. Indeed,
the whole lm is plagued by technical gaes, including sloppy edits
and overexposed shots; the camera crew is momentarily visible in a
mirror, an actor is given a cue on-screen, a missing prop is tossed in, the
director intervenes to address the viewers to explain why an important
scene was not shot. These Brechtian self-interruptions make the lm, as
Catherine Davies has observed, a parodic homage to Garca Espinosas
imperfect cinema, with Cuban lmmaking presented here not as
radical third cinema at the cutting edge but as bungling incompetence.
The imperfections are perfectly controlled, like the eggs that splatter on
walls at perfectly timed intervals, which drive the plot forward and con-
stitute a game between the director and the spectator, in which the for-
mer assumes the right to play god and challenges the latter to second-
guess the moment when the hidden hand will strike again. As Prez
Betancourt put it, the most dramatic moments are nonchalantly inter-
 438 Return of the Popular

rupted by devices that keep reminding the spectators that theyre watch-
ing a lm,60 while Jess Daz nds that these devices are integrated into
the lms structure in an organic manner that gives them narrative
value and enriches Tabos brilliant cinematographic treatment. This is
particularly eective, Daz believes, in delivering the lms critique of
bureaucracy: The mechanism that consists in doing violence to reality,
whatever the price, characteristic of the voluntaristic Cuban bureau-
cracy and responsible for many deciencies in our production, ends up
also part of the lms plot, which thus carries a strong electric shock.61
The extraordinary outcome deals the viewer a double blow. The com-
edy is revealed as a tragedy, as Concha succumbs to a heart attack, and
the mystery of the eggs is uncovered: they have all been throwing them,
unknown to each other, but with the same intention: to persuade Concha
to marry Toms, to go and live with him, and let the young couple have
the house to themselves. But who threw the rst egg and gave them all
the idea? The answer is revealed by the missing rst reel of the lm,
which has turned up during the projection to be tacked on at the end:
it was Concha herself, who threw an egg at her son and Clarita before
they got married at the beginning of reel two, in order to try and drive
her away.
Pla! is clearly a lm in the tradition of imperfect cinema, in which
at the same time one senses a new departure, a turn toward a new sense
of ambiguity in the representation of the social process, which also nds
expression in a growing susceptibility for the surreal. The lm is ren-
dered peculiarly disconcerting by its double set of interruptions, the
surrealistic eggs and the technical mishaps, beginning with the inter-
ruption at the very start, which only demonstrates that you can launch
into a story anywhere you like. The interpretive cues are ineluctably
mixed. One critic suggests that the lm loosely follows the narrative
structure of the detective genre, with Conchas madrina (the santera she
goes to for guidance) playing the role of the detective, while another
complains of the disconcerting eclecticism of what he expected to be
an enjoyable comedy of customs.62 The comedy is absurdist, while the
cinematography is that of the new-wave realism of Retrato de Teresa,
and the acting similarly is completely straight. As for Concha herself,
Tabo has borrowed from certain lms of Alea the trope of a central pro-
tagonist who repels identication; Concha is not at all a likable character,
but a paranoid neurotic, consumed by resentment, hardly deserving of
 Return of the Popular 439

Pla! o demasiado miedo a la vida (Juan Carlos Tabo, 1988)

the spectators sympathy even if she is a victim of machismo. He then

wields the parallel narratives to establish a clear equivalence between
Conchas fear of life and the dead hand of bureaucracy that threatens
to suocate her daughter-in-law. An early scene has Clarita criticizing
Concha precisely for coldly following the rules in the shop where she
works when they could be interpreted more liberally to help a customer;
later, Conchas madrina explains that she cast a spell without a name:
This business of identity is very important. Thats why we have pass-
ports, ngerprints, ID cards, and birth certicates. The saints have their
bureaucracy too. Beneath our laughter, the noose is tightening, and
when the circle closes at the end with the missing beginning, the lm
simply refuses to absolve the spectator.
Cuban critics compared Pla! to Aleas La muerte de un burcrata, in
consideration of both its principal satiric target and its comic style, with
its allusions to the comedy classics. But Pla! is more than Burcrata
revisited, for here the equation of death and bureaucracy is much more
chilling. For another thing, Tabos lm is equally indebted to the de-
constructionism of Garca Espinosas Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin
 440 Return of the Popular

and is also more than Juan Quin Quin revisited, for Pla!s deconstruc-
tion of comedy serves not merely to subvert the ideology of the image
on the screen, but to question the lifeworld outside the cinema that it
is taken to represent. In short, Pla! combines both models in a tragi-
comedy that implicates the spectator in a sadistic practical joke with
tragic consequences. Despite its huge success with the Cuban public, it
is not a comfortable lm.
For the last of these lms, Orlando Rojas chose a lifeworld very dier-
ent from both Pla! and his own rst feature, Una novia para David
indeed, nothing in that rst and rather lightweight genre movie pre-
pares us for the complex subtleties of Papeles secundarios (Supporting
roles), which are played out in the rareed, dark, enclosed atmosphere
of the theater. A company of actors is preparing a production of a mod-
ern Cuban classic, Carlos Felipes Requiem por Yarini, a tragic love story
set in a Havana brothel at the beginning of the century. Under the man-
agement of an aging star, Rosa, the company has lost its sense of direc-
tion. The companys female principal, Mirta, is at the point of abandon-
ing the stage when Alejandro, a director condemned to years in the
provinces for ideological misdemeanors who has nally been given the
chance to redeem himself, oers her the lead. All of them face the chal-
lenge of a group of young actors who have just joined the company, and
the unsettling eects of a visit by a government inspector. The inspector
insists that youth is in fashion; the young actors question the relevance
of a play dating from 1960 about the turn of the century to the lives of
their own generation, yet they too belong to the same theatrical world
of fragile egos, of self-dramatized fears, and anxieties over love and suc-
cess, in which identity and character are suspended and intermingled,
and which always exercises enormous vicarious fascination on the mere
spectator. As Paranagua puts it, the microcosm presented by a theater
group putting on a play immediately introduces a plurality of levels and
the promise of metaphorical readings, especially when the play in ques-
tion resonates with the underpinning plotsuch that the games of
power and seduction among the characters in the play are echoed among
the actors who play them. Paranagua observes that Rojas doesnt mind
at all running the risk of overdoing it, obviously preferring to have too
much rather than emptiness, banality and sloppiness. For Prez Betan-
court, this excess derives from the theatricality that is a basic premise of
the mise-en-scne, allowing Rojas, on the one hand, to maintain, in the
 Return of the Popular 441

Papeles secundarios (Orlando Rojas, 1989)

photography, the dialogue, and the montage, a constant play with the
art of suggestion, and, on the other, justifying passages of extended
dialogue that make the lm unquestionably demanding but reward the
spectators intelligence in a manner uncommon in Cuban cinema, and
that give the lm a certain European cast. (Variety, on the other hand,
found the lm a rambling, talky pic, a non-story with a tedious
script.)63
For Davies, the doubling eects of the play within the lm are sev-
eral: the characters in the play, which dramatizes Afro-Cuban magic,
function as incarnations of Yoruba spirits, with their own duplicities
and constant doubling, which further blurs the boundaries between
real and ctive identities, including sexual identity. Furthermore, the
spectator must handle four frames of reference: the timelessness of Afro-
Cuban myth; a social drama of 1910; the representation of the drama in
1960; and the contemporary reality of 1989 when it is being staged. In
this way, the microcosm opens out to encompass the functions of alle-
gory, and the result is an expressive density all the more vivid for what
Paranagua calls the rigorous and sophisticated aesthetics of the image.64
The story unfolds in an ambiance of shadows, enclosed spaces, and con-
 442 Return of the Popular

stant rain. The camera pans along corridors past open doors giving
glimpses of dressing rooms. Windows are forever being opened and
closed again. Repeated images of water and light become symbols of
promise and life both fullled and unfullled. When the group takes a
break on the theater roof, the bitching and generational conicts are
momentarily dissolved under the purifying sunlightbut there is also
water at hand to baptize the sinners, as Prez Betancourt puts it.65
Paranagua reserves special praise for the cinematography of Ral Prez
Ureta, who succeeds in totally overturning the lighting, the framing
and the colours that have prevailed in Cuban cinema, proving that the
insipidity of the images since the change-over to colour could not be
blamed on the quality of the stock or other technical constraints.66 Rojas
himself comments that his intention was to break with what he called
the frontalism of the Cuban camera, a limiting tendency from a plas-
tic point of view, to full-on, objective, and plain composition, which
went along with another recurrent problem of Cuban cinema, namely,
a certain rhetorical intention toward explication and information to
be found in its scripts. Instead, following a line that was half Sols and
half Alea (the lm could have been made, he claimed, by either of them),
his purpose was not to present a nished discourse where the spectator
takes away prefabricated ideas accepted for what they are [but] quite
the opposite, to oer them various points of view, various possibilities
for rethinking history.67
This history is marked, as Caballero and del Ro observe, by dejected
resignation in the face of arbitrary arrangements and mechanisms of
the kind that frustrated the generation of the 1970s, as a result of the
particularly rigid politics of the decadea history evoked by the story
Mirtha recounts of her erstwhile lover, a young poet forced to abandon
the country for writing existential poems that ocialdom judged as
decadent. As Paranagua puts it, this bravura piece of acting by Luisa
Prez Nieto exposes a wound that is at the same time emotional and
social and one of the lms strongest political moments.68 Rojas wishes
to reclaim the space for an existential discourse, taking his motivation
from human interiority and interrelations, not for the purpose of psy-
chologizing the individualhe prefers to respect the secret intentions
that are a constant in almost all the charactersbut in order to reconnect
the private and the political, and thus call into question phenomena
like machismo, bureaucracy, double standards, the painful divisions of
 Return of the Popular 443

exile, the marginalization of youth. Parallel, then, to the intimate intro-

spection of the lm, there is another half-hidden discourse that weaves
subtle allegories on power as a dark, frustrating, and discriminatory
force.
The Cuban critics conclude: The expressive richness, the dramatic
study of color, the narrative fragmentation that refers to atomized lives,
the disintegration (the result of cuts on movement, as unusual in Cuban
cinema as it is common elsewhere in modern lms), make Papeles secun-
darios one of the peaks of Cuban cinema of the 1980s, unique in the
high ambition with which it merges social investigation with a markedly
metaphorical language and the expressive autonomy of lmic art, itself
capable of signication. And they note that Rojas is responsible for a
text called Por un cinema incmodo (For an uncomfortable cinema), a
title that alludes to Garca Espinosas essay of twenty years earlier, and
stakes a claim to representing the same tradition.69 Both the dierences
and possible correspondence between the uncomfortable according to
Rojas and the imperfect according to Garca Espinosa represent, they
believe, a tenacious vocation to which Cuban cinema still sometimes
aspired in the 1980s.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Wonderland

Perestroika began to destabilize the Cuban economy well before Castro

declared the Special Period in Times of Peace in 1990, the year before
the collapse of Soviet communism. In 1987, as perestroika brought un-
intended disruption in the ussr, Cuban imports from the Soviet Union,
which had grown steadily for nearly three decades, suddenly went into
reverse, and economic activity began to contract (Miami Herald, March
10, 1988). By the middle of 1988, diplomatic sources in Havana were sug-
gesting that the dierences between Gorbachevs perestroika and Castros
rectication were becoming deeply political, and foreign journalists re-
ported that Castro was out of step with his patrons in Moscow (Sun-
day Times, June 26, 1988). It seemed a major ideological split was in the
ong, as Havanas determination to remain a bastion of socialism
clashed with the stark reality that Cubas centrally planned economy
was unable to cope with the decentralizing reforms going on in the
Comecon countries. A year later, in his traditional speech at the annual
celebration of July 26, Castro replied with deance to Gorbachevs de-
mands, during a visit to Cuba earlier in the year, that Cuba fall into line
with economic reform to reduce its reliance on Soviet aid, instead char-
acterizing the political and economic reforms inherent in perestroika as
concessions to capitalist concepts of democracy and the free market (In-
dependent, July 28, 1989). Knowing that new cuts in Soviet support were
about to hit, he warned Cubans to brace themselves for more economic
diculties. He also expressed concern and astonishment that the oppo-
sition might win elections in Poland and Hungary, but conspicuously

444
 Wonderland 445

made no mention of Cubas own political upheaval, which had culmi-

nated two weeks earlier in the execution of four senior army ocers for
corruption and drug smuggling. A month later, the Cuban government
placed a ban on two Soviet publications, Sputnik and Moscow News,
which Granma accused of becoming an apologia for bourgeois and cap-
italist values, denying history, and presenting a chaotic impression of
the present (Guardian, August 5, 1989). By the end of the year, this
history-denying chaos was becoming fact, as communist power abdi-
cated or disappeared in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria, and the German Democratic Republic. Would Cuba not be
next? In Miami, many supposed so, and even some in Havana.
According to French commentator Janette Habel, one of the reasons
Moscow News bothered the Cuban leadership was its coverage of the
new electoral experiences in Russia, but the ban was as much due to
internal tensions as it was to dierences with Moscow.1 Granma justi-
ed it on grounds that included the damaging inuence these examples
of glasnost exercised on ill-informed young people bent on mimicry of
the Soviet Union. It was precisely this kind of misplaced paternalism
that aggravated the youth, and provoked, among other things, the icon-
oclastic creations of the young plastic artists of the 1980s that began to
test the patience of the regime. These artists were certainly not imitat-
ing Moscow. Described by the American David Craven as a highly dis-
tinctive and rambunctious generation, they combined a post-modernist
engagement with home-made kitsch and the Surrealist tradition of
disjunctive guration and tense assemblages with the critical assimila-
tion of foreign idioms and a devotion to hybridizationan aesthetic
not unlike that which had been developing in a more populist form at
icaic.2
Some commentators speculated that the Special Period in Times of
Peace implied the sort of restrictions on freedom of expression associ-
ated with times of war, but this is simplistic. The evidence suggests a
battle between dierent tendencies and levels within the party. Although
Fidel had criticized the timidity of the press in 1986, the media re-
mained rmly under the thumb of the partys ideological overseers, while
the cultural regime remained a liberal one. In testing the limits of this
liberalism, the young artists provoked a backlash among hard-liners,
whose position was strengthened as political tensions with the Soviet
Union mounted. In 1988, the same year Fidel appeared at the uneac
 446 Wonderland

congress and asserted full liberty for artists in content as well as form, a
number of shows were canceled or closed for various reasons that the
artistic community interpreted as euphemisms for censorship. A few
weeks after the ban on the Soviet publications in 1989, a series of exhi-
bitions by young artists in the Castillo de la Fuerza was shut down after
some portraits of Fidel by Eduardo Pon Juan and Ren Francisco caused
oense. One of them depicted Castro speaking in the Plaza de la Revo-
lucin to a myriad of reections of himself, another, titled Suicide,
showed him on a shooting range again surrounded by mirrors. Accord-
ing to the art critic Gerardo Mosquera, writing in 1991, It was the nal
cut, that show in 1989. From that time to today, the cultural arena has
been closing. . . . The visual arts were the rst to open critical issues in
Cuban culture. They have been enclosing that space and encouraging
the artists to go.3 icaic would come under attack for displaying a sim-
ilar parodistic irreverence in the lm Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas by
Daniel Daz Torres, and the Film Institute was precipitated, as we shall
see, into the greatest crisis of its history when the lm was attacked by
the party faithful as counterrevolutionary, and banned.
If the collapse of communism was not even expected by right-wing
capitalists, as if they too believed in Marxs principle that history is ir-
reversible, in Cuba the eects were crushing. In November 1990, new mea-
sures were introduced against corruption and the growing black mar-
ket; ve hundred people were arrested over the next three months. In
December, crowds of youths rioted in two towns near Havana. In Bejucal,
they marched on the police station after police had wounded a drunken
reveler. In Pinar del Ro, a crowd surrounded the jail demanding the re-
lease of an arrested youth; two people were reportedly killed in the fray.
This kind of disturbance was mild in comparison to the everyday vio-
lence of economic distress in other Latin American countries, but in
Cuba it signaled a painful process of social readjustment that implied
an attack on thirty years of socialist values. A few months later, visiting
the location in Old Havana where Humberto Sols was shooting El siglo
de las luces, I was engaged in conversation by one of the assistant direc-
tors whom I knew from previous visits as a friendly acquaintance, who
expressed between takes the huge disillusion into which the recent events,
both at home and abroad, had cast him and his friends. He would not
predict what might happennobody wouldbut insisted simply that
 Wonderland 447

everyone had been living a dream, the beautiful dream of socialism, a

dream that was now over.
The Cuban economy, disconnected from its lines of credit, its mar-
kets, and sources of supply, suered a huge decline in foreign trade and
buying power (the gures dier according to the sources consulted).
To be thus stranded in a sea of international capitalism gave rise to in-
tensied sensations of isolation and helplessness, and fear of new vul-
nerability to threats from Washington, the apparent victor of the Cold
War. In the words of the Cuban political scientist Rafael Hernndez,
To wake up in the postCold War world was for Cubans like waking
up to an endless nightmare.4 If the ruin of actually existing socialism
produced disorientation, and what Hernndez calls a loss of historical
references, in large sectors of the population, the result included loss of
faith in the dogmatic discourse of the Communist Party and its scholas-
tic catechisms that was shared by many artists and intellectuals. But
there were also important sectors where the shock discovery that social-
ism was reversible nourished a spirit of resistance, and especially in the
face of intensifying U.S. pressure, a conservative defense of the regime.
As ocial rhetoric began to shift away from appeal to Marxism and
back to the Cuban nationalist pantheon of Flix Varela and Jos Mart,
where social justice can only be achieved through the countrys authen-
tic independence, these sentiments would mesh with a powerful sense
of patriotism to prevent the body politic from disintegrating, but only
on condition that the regime accepted the need for a degree of economic
liberalization.
The dismantling of the Soviet bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union
left Cuba in a crisis of double isolation. As the supply of everyday goods
shriveled and the country spiraled toward near-bankruptcy, the Special
Period became one of electricity blackouts, severe gasoline rationing,
huge cuts in public transport, and bicycles from China. Dollars, which
were illegal tender but came into the country with tourists and visitors
from the exile community in Miami, fueled a growing black market, as
the exchange rate on the street rate rose to fty and then 150 pesos to
the dollar. At a political meeting in icaic, Alea presented a paper on the
situation. A luxury hotel in the resort of Varadero, he had learned, one
of the new mixed enterprises managed by a Spanish company, con-
sumed no more than 40 percent of the quantity of goods supplied to a
 448 Wonderland

similar hotel at the same resort under Cuban administration. In other

words, some 60 percent of the goods supplied to the Cuban hotel was
disappearing into the subterranean economy.5 On one level or another
everyone was involved, since many everyday articles, from lightbulbs to
toothpaste, could often not be obtained by other means except recourse
to the informal sector of the economy. An ethos developed in which,
because everyone did it, they also forgave each other for it. There was
no other way to get by.
Filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals all felt the consequences along
with everybody else. At icaic, although they managed to keep the an-
nual lm festival going, not only would they be forced to curtail pro-
duction, but they also faced radical alteration in the economic regime
that provided for their existence. In 1991, state companies involved in
import/export were instructed to aim for nancial autonomy in hard-
currency dealingsin other words, no more subsidies. icaics foreign
income from distribution was never very great, but by dint of copro-
ductions, the sale of services, and hire of personnel to foreign producers,
which had all been growing during the 1980s, it was able to fulll the
new requirements and even bring in dollars. Yet now, the economic col-
lapse of the country meant that home-based production without for-
eign participation would be drastically reduced, and lmmakers would
become idle. The consequences included an erosion of the Institutes
personnel as its members began to disperse, seeking work in other coun-
tries (although some found useful employment at the international lm
school at San Antonio de los Baos; in 1993, after leaving icaic, Garca
Espinosa would shoot a feature on video with students at the school
called El Plano [The shot] as a demonstration of how to make a virtu-
ally no-budget lm).
The whole cultural sector suered. Plastic artists were not only under
political pressure to conform but lost the domestic market for their work
that had opened up in the 1980s. With work piling up in their studios
unsold, they quickly began to leave in such numbers that one commen-
tator calls it a mass exodus by a veritable roll call of the 80s genera-
tion6 (although they would soon be replaced by the next). Musicians,
who continued to enjoy huge popularity while suering the same pri-
vations as their audiences, took every opportunity for trips abroad. These
opportunities were on the increase because the period coincided with
 Wonderland 449

the rediscovery of Cuban music by foreign audiences and promoters. By

the mid-1990s, music had become Cubas principal cultural export, far
greater than lm had ever been, embroiled in an ideologically ambigu-
ous trade that inevitably transmitted certain stereotypes along with its
apparently nonideological joie de vivre. Worst hit were the writers, when
the publishing industry was brought to its knees through a collapse in
the paper supply. The news reached the ears of the Economist in Lon-
don, which reported that Cuba had been hit by a paper shortage un-
paralleled in 32 years of revolution. With Soviet shipments no longer
guaranteed and no hard currency to buy supplies elsewhere, printing
has come to a standstill. An estimated $17m would be needed to main-
tain present levels of book production.7 Two months later I found two
friends in Havana who worked in academic publishing languishing at
home without any work to do, and another friend, a writer, frustrated at
the closure of the journals he wrote for. Only one of them was still in
Cuba when I was next there in 1995, but the regime they left behind
had not collapsed.

Despite the growing crisis, icaic completed three features in 1990. It is

notable that in all of them the central characters are women, carrying
the suggestion that the representation of women was now recognized as
specially fertile ground for investigation, although only one of these
lms had a contemporary setting. Hello Hemingway by Fernando Prez
is a sequel to his earlier Clandestinos, another youth lm set in the 1950s,
but here portraying the frustrations of the time from the perspective of
Larita, a talented girl from a poor background, struggling to win a schol-
arship to study in the United States, who happens to be a neighbor of
the famous American writer. Hemingway, who is seldom there, and
never more than glimpsed in the distance, is a mere cipher for Laritas
longings; it is not the unapproachable gure of the writer but Laritas
reading of The Old Man and the Sea that gives the lm its resonance.
She argues with her rebellious boyfriend and comes to realize that her
background and lack of nancial resources will prevent her dream of a
scholarship coming true. In genre terms, this is a coming-of-age story
that once again allegorizes the nation as a young woman seeking to take
control of her destiny. It includes a memorable cameo appearance by
Jos Manuel Rodrguez as the old bookseller who encourages Larita to
 450 Wonderland

read Hemingways novella and explains to her its theme: a man may be
destroyed, but he cannot be defeated. An extremely modest lm, which
deftly recaptures the look of 1950s Havana in a few strokes, the tale is
handled with a sensitivity and reserve that allow it to address the young
audience of 1990 without preaching or condescension. For an older
viewer, it oers the pleasure of a gentle rumination on the theme of the
secret dialogue between writer and reader, who may even be neighbors,
but always remain unknown to each other.
Sergio Giral had turned back to history for Plcido in 1986, based on
events in Matanzas in 1844, when a mulatto poet, caught up by the
racial, political, and human contradictions in which he lives, ends up
being shot on trumped-up charges as the leader of a black conspiracy.
Taken from a play by Gerardo Fulleda, the lm was judged too histri-
onic, and failed to make its mark. Mara Antonia, this time taken from
a play by Eugenio Hernndez, proved a much greater success. Mara
Antonia is a mulatta living in a Havana slum in the 1950s, in rebellion
against both men and the Yoruba divinities, whose tumultuous rela-
tionship with a boxer and deance of the santeros leads to tragedy.
Deeply rooted in the Santera it portrayed, the play had been shelved
after it rst opened in 1967, until the period of dogmatism passed and it
was rehabilitated; in some ways, therefore, it can be seen, despite the
setting of the 1950s, as a contemporary story, a calling of attention to
the superstition and violence that persisted in what ocial rhetoric
continued to call the marginal sectors of society. On one level this is not
a political tract, the female lead is not an allegorical gure, the lm is
not a social metaphor. Girals intention, supported by music from the
group Sntesis, was to reinstate certain elements found in the rumbera
or low-life cinema of Latin America in the 1950s, through the story of
a woman who cannot conquer her destiny, and in this way to present an
existential melodrama.8 The power of the lm, as Garca Borrero puts it,
lies in the conviction of its atmosphere and the credibility of the action.
Paranagua goes further. For him, the lm recovers the mythical dimen-
sion and gives it dramatic function: Not only is machismo depicted
without any blandishments, shown in all its brutality, but also its oppo-
site and complement, hembrismo. A whole religious, moral, familial and
sexual psychology is exposed with sweltering sensuality. Never before
have Cuban screens cast such a raw light on the carnal relations be-
 Wonderland 451

tween men and women. Girals mise-en-scne convinces through its

passionate fusion of social tragedy and popular mythology in an atmo-
sphere dripping with eroticism. You have to see the lm, says Paranagua,
in an overheated cinema in Havana, to fully appreciate how directly it
manages to touch a hidden side within its audience.9 (Some would say
not so hidden.) In the process, however, the lm represents a challenge
to the ideological orthodoxy that persists in considering this world as a
marginal one, when it can also be said that its survival marks it as one
of the most deeply characteristic features of Cuban popular culture.
Meanwhile, faced with a reduction in icaics program of produc-
tion owing to the economic crisis, the grupo de creacin headed by
Humberto Sols had come up with the idea of a compendium, a feature
comprising ve separate episodes around a theme summed up by the
title, Mujer transparente (Transparent woman), an update on the prog-
ress of women in Cuban society in the form of ve stories of represen-
tative women of dierent ages and social background, which would also
serve as an outing in ction for a new generation of directors (and many
of the producers, scriptwriters, cinematographers, editors, and musi-
cians working with them). The ve directors, all experienced in docu-
mentary or as assistant directors in features, were Hctor Veita, Mayra
Segura, Mayra Vilass, Mario Crespo, and Ana Rodrguez. Despite their
varied styles and aesthetics, the lms are unied by using the perspec-
tive of feminine interiority (all but one are narrated by the protagonists
voice-over) to ask a series of awkward questions, and cumulatively, and
in some cases individually, they bring something new to Cuban cinema.
Veitas Isabel is a middle-aged woman, totally eclipsed at home, who
is promoted to a managerial position at work and rebels against the in-
sensitivity of her husband and grown-up children, who cannot under-
stand what the promotion means to her. Seguras Adriana attempts to
enter the fantasy world of a lonely old woman through an imaginative
treatment of image and sound, in the single setting of her lonely apart-
ment. In Julia, with Mirta Ibarra in the title role, Vilass presents a
womans recollections of a failed marriage. The visual economy of this
short lm, says Zuzana Pick, which simply intercuts Julia in the present,
performing everyday actions, with images of her past, is designed to
emphasise privacy as the space in which interiority is given full expres-
sion. As the characters intense questioning of past and present plays
 452 Wonderland

itself out in the darkened apartment, the lm articulates the courageous

resolve of a divorced woman in an armative image of retrospec-
tion and, despite its ambivalent ending, an empowering portrait of
femininity.10 Fourth, Crespos Zoe presents two diametrically opposed
characters, the eponymous art student, a nonconformist frustrated by
the rigid framework in which she has to live and study, and the disci-
plined militant, whom she ironically calls Battleship Potemkin, sent to
investigate her absence from the university. Here another single set-
tingthe garage-cum-studio where she livesis used to observe gen-
der and social dierences close up, in a mise-en-scne that brings to the
screen the milieu of the rebellious young artists of the late 1980s. It also,
says Garca Borrero, anticipates what will become one of the great
themes of the Cuban cinema of the 1990s, namely, tolerance of the
other, the exploration of the possibility or impossibility of dialogue,11
while Pick sums up: femininity in Mujer transparente is contradictory,
contextualized by generation, social background, personal history, and
introspection.
It was the last episode, however, that was for several critics the most
successful. In Laura, Rodrguez presents a womans uncertain emotions
toward a childhood girlfriend who chose to leave the country and is
now returning for a visit. The most obviously political of the ve lms,
Lauras reminiscences of the two decades she has known her friend
sketch out a history with which Cubans of more than one generation
and both sexes could easily identify. Images of adolescence intercut with
shots of Laura waiting for her friend in the hotel contrast the mutual
estrangement of people in the lobby with private nostalgia, underlined
by historical footage that references the backstory to the events of Mariel.
Amid the tensions created by tourism, lost illusions, and wasted ener-
gies, the hotel lobby becomes a hostile space, where Laura is ignored by
the desk clerk, thus making her feel an alien in her own country and
provoking the question Why do they treat those of us who stayed with
such contempt? The entire lm serves as a question. The opening line
Who are you, Polly Magoo?spoken over a black-and-white photo
of a young woman in a miniskirt, sets o Lauras interior journey. I
look at myself in those photos, she says, and I dont recognize myself.
Later, over footage of the rallies that led up to the exodus from Mariel,
she says, You cannot see in black and white the most concrete feel-
 Wonderland 453

ings. In this way, through her own sense of nostalgia and loss, Lauras
subjectivity speaks for the collectivity. For Garca Borrero, A single se-
quence, which through masterly editing combines shots of those who
left being abused by a noisy crowd, and the same people returning ap-
parently to the adoration of the same crowds, stands as one of the most
perturbing scenes in all Cuban cinema.12
The following year, the troubled milieu of Havana at the beginning
of the decade is eectively captured in Adorables mentiras (Adorable
lies), the debut feature of Gerardo Chijona, which pursues several con-
cerns that rst surfaced in the critical social comedies of the 1980s. To
begin with, it revisits the same terrain treated straight in Hasta cierto
punto and as comedy in Pla!that of Cuban cinema itself, which here
becomes the object of an ironically narcissistic self-satire. A lm extra
and would-be screenwriter, Jorge Luis, meets beautiful Sissy at a lm
premiere. In order to impress her, he claims to be a director looking for
a new actress. Harboring screen dreams of her own, she in turn invents
a suitably glamorous identity with which to impress him. Both give false
names, both neglect to mention that theyre marriedand a compli-
cated romance ensues as each falls passionately in love with the assumed
persona of the other. In short, an outrageous comedy with a showdown
ending, made with help from Spanish TV and Robert Redfords Sun-
dance Institute, which, according to one report, ran into censorship
problems that delayed its release.13 But why?
Take two: Jorge Luis, a lm extra and would-be screenwriter, is strug-
gling to maintain a wife and child while trying to write a script on spec
for Arturo, an established director. Entranced by a woman he sees at
the cinema, whom he fantasizes as Natassia Kinski, he boasts to her of
being a prize-winning director of documentaries working on his rst
feature, by the name of Ricardo Girona (a play on the name of the lms
director). Sissy, in turn, taking the name of Isabel, hides from him her
marriage to Garca, a corrupt and middle-aged bureaucrat who saved
her from a tarnished past. When Sissy nds herself falling in love with
Ricardo Girona, she turns for advice to her older friend Nancya
gure from her shady past whom her husband has banished from his
presencewhile Jorge Luiss wife, Flora, distraught over his lack of at-
tention to her, is encouraged by her neighbor Rita in the suspicion that he
has gone over and is having a homosexual aair with Arturo. Rita
 454 Wonderland

supplements her income by selling bottles of vanilla on the street illegally.

Nancy is a social(ist) disaster, a loose woman whose misery drives her
to drink, the black market, and the brink of suicide. Before the lm is over
and the deception unmasked, Garca will be threatened with exposure
for embezzlement of funds on a foreign trip. Variety called the lm A
frank look at life in Cuba, where fantasy can be more appealing than the
reality of scarce food and cramped apartments. Catherine Davies,
more sympathetically, calls it a lm about broken dreams and lost illu-
sions and the duplicity involved in sustaining the Cuban dream. It is
given to the uneducated Nancy to articulate this element in the lms
subtext with a comic seriousness that makes it all the more poignant.
Recovering from a failed suicide bid, she complains to Sissy that she
cant even dream. Ive also had bad moments, Sissy replies, but I
dont kill myself. Its dierent for you, says Nancy, you belong to the
Julio Iglesias generation, mine was the Beatles. Sissy objects, They didnt
even let you listen to them. That doesnt matter, says Nancy, I was
able to dream . . . I could be a teacher, a doctor . . . You couldnt. Every-
things laid out for you now. If you want to work on a hill and they say a
hole, you end up in a hole. I used to dream, but I got it all wrong.
Paranagua writes that Senel Pazs script makes a link between a critique
of individual hypocrisy in sexual and conjugal relations with double
standards in social life: the bureaucrats corruption is part of a chain of
deceit that includes the apprentice intellectual and the prostitute eking
out a living on the black marketa lm, then, about dreams and illu-
sions, which uses a story about conjugal hypocrisy to take a swipe at the
pretensions of the cinema, and thereby to contrast the fantasy world of
the screen with the intractability of real life.
The lm has a lightweight tone, and a bright and agile appearance.
The actors play straight, but at certain moments, aided by bursts of
ironically sentimental music, it takes o self-consciously into the most
soupy representation of romance, only to be brought back down to
ground by sharply crosscutting to one of the parallel plot lines. The
satire against the lost illusions of Cuban cinema is merciless, and prone
to in-jokes. Jorge Luis, sitting in front of his beat-up old typewriter,
daydreams of being Jean-Claude Carrire in front of an Apple Macin-
tosh. When Sissy tells Nancy she has fallen in love with a lm director,
Nancy, a woman of the world, responds witheringly, Oh, not that!
There arent many directors in Cuba. You think hell just give you a
 Wonderland 455

part? No, says Sissy, but hell give me an audition. Sure, Nancy
replies, I auditioned for Cecilia Valds, for Marie Antoinette, and for
that woman who eats her children. And the rst thing they want is to
see your tits. The script Jorge Luis is writing is set in the world of the
cabaret, where Jorge Luis has pretensions to lm the tragedy behind
the glitter, meanwhile taking Sissy-Isabel to dinner at the Tropicana. In
a delicious moment, Nancy didently enters a church to go to confes-
sion; the priest is played by Santiago lvarez. But behind the jokes lies a
serious problem: the experience of dierent generations is indeed quite
distinct. A rst-time director in the Special Period, surrounded by signs
of the collapse of the socialism, cannot make lms with the same un-
complicated enthusiasm for the Revolution as twenty years earlier
even if some of the audience still wanted such lmsand he is quite
aware of it. However, this is far from saying that a lm like this is di-
rected against the revolution.
Like Papeles secundarios, the plot involves a series of doublings, which
here center on the key scene in which Jorge Luis, who is genuinely writ-
ing a real script but pretending to be his alias, auditions Sissy, who is
pretending to be Isabel, but who is really trying to act the part, a scene
that, as it unfolds, teases and implicates the spectator with the passage
from the acting of sexual attraction to the frisson of its real manifesta-
tion. (Isabel Santos claimed she had diculties representing Sissy: she
has two facets: as she really is and as she seems to be. . . . I had to be two
characters in the same scene.)14 The crosscurrents set in play among the
central group of protagonistsone man and three womenreminded
some critics of the rising star of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodvar, and
others of Woody Allen, but the most illuminating intertextual referents
are to be found in Cuban cinema itself. Adorables mentiras deals in one
of the most curious phenomena to emerge in Cuban cinema at this
time: the doubling of characters between dierent lms, that is to say,
lms that without being sequels in the conventional sense, employ the
same actors playing comparable roles in dierent dramas, sometimes
even with the same name, a form of intertextuality that carries the sug-
gestion that the other lms in which they have appeared represent their
past and real secret lives. Thus Luis Alberto Garca (in the part of Jorge
Luis) has played opposite both Isabel Santos (as Sissy) and Thas Valds
(as Flora) before: with the former as the ill-starred lovers of Clandestinos,
and as the latters husband in Pla!. As Catherine Davies remarks, the
 456 Wonderland

Cuban viewers would have been shocked to see him looking so thin and
drawn (he lost thirty pounds to play the part in Adorables mentiras), but
would sympathizethey would take it as a sign of the times.15 They
were also confronted, however, with his transformation from supportive
husband to one who cheats on his wife, while Thas Valds was no longer
the condent and modern young woman of the former lm, but a down-
trodden housewife trying to make ends meet, while Isabel Santos had
turned from an unsung heroine of the Revolution into a trendy, cropped-
haired blonde, a woman so perfectly capable of masking her Cuban
identity that the black-market money traders in the street mistake her
for a tourist. Nor is Mirta Ibarras Nancywho will later reappear in
Aleas Fresa y chocolatethe same self-condent liberated woman as Lina
in Hasta cierto punto. But these changes, however brutal, are no more
than those that the Cuban audience could observe within themselves,
thereby strengthening the bond between character and spectator.
This phenomenon is neither a matter of typecasting, nor are these
simply the expectable reincarnations of actors as dierent characters
that can be found in any regular lm industry and that underpin the
star system. Perhaps because Cuban lms are so few, the result of this
recurrence is that these lms begin to hinge together, as Davies puts it,
like a national family saga. In these circumstances, Cuban lm actors
quickly come to embody ego-ideals that are independent of the charac-
ters they portray, but the stu that gives these characters their density.
Tabo said that Pla! and the earlier Se permuta were the same lm
told twice because they presented the same characters.16 When the same
actors turn up again in Adorables mentiras, the audience perceives them
as familiar friends and regards them as basically buena gente, good peo-
ple, whom circumstances have induced to develop double standards in
order to survive, thus identifying with characters who are false, involved
in all sorts of role-playing, from whom at the same time they are dis-
tanced by the lms softened Brechtian alienation eects. The director
of the lm himself displays the same ambivalence toward his own charac-
ters when he sums up, the lm sticks its nose in several things, includ-
ing the crisis of Cuban cinematheres a scriptwriter with no talent, a
stupid lmmaker, and a housewife who all want to change itand all
of them behave mendaciously. . . . I love them all. This last admission is
crucial to the proper comprehension of what is going on here. It is also
true of Pla! and Papeles secundarios and other such lms. The charac-
 Wonderland 457

ters are not arraigned in order to judge them for their failings, but only
in order to allow them to confess to them, and thereby to be collec-
tively absolved.

Adorables mentiras was somewhat eclipsed when icaic was thrown into
political crisis by the other new lm of the year, when Alicia en el pueblo
de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown), directed by Daniel Daz Torres,
was banned in Cuba after winning an award at the Berlin Film Festival.
The crisis was compounded by the announcement around the same
time of a scheme to merge icaic with Cuban television and the lm
unit of the Armed Forces, as part of a general plan of rationalization of
human and material resources by the state, in the face of the greater
economic crisis that had befallen Cuba with the collapse of commu-
nism in Eastern Europe. At icaic, following unprecedented protests by
the lm directors, the situation was resolved by the end of the summer.
The Institute survived, but the lm remained banned, and the head of
Institute, Julio Garca Espinosa, was replaced by the return of its founder,
Alfredo Guevara. That we can still talk of Cuban cinema today, accord-
ing to Enrique Colina in 1995, is due to strong protests by Cuban lm-
makers against the suppression of this lm, which was seen as an act of
censorship directed not merely against the lm itself but, because of
the accompanying threat against the lm institute, against the right to
free artistic expression.17
First reports of the lm, after its Berlin screening, suggested that it
revisited the same terrain as La muerte de un burcrata by Toms Guti-
rrez Alea back in 1966, a black comedy about the sins of bureaucracy.
Colina calls Alicia a satirical parody of the misadventures of a Cuban
Alice in an imaginary hell-town, where those guilty of lse-majest
against Socialism redeem their sins. A surreal metaphor, absurd and ex-
aggerated. Maravillas is a town lost in the crack between two provinces
where a job as a community drama coach awaits the lms Alicia (Thas
Valds). Her friends advise her not to gothe place is notorious for its
microclimate of strong winds and strangely colored overhanging clouds.
In Maravillas, Alicia nds, nothing works properly and the people be-
have in the strangest ways. A restaurant has chained the cutlery to the
table to prevent its being stolen, and some of the chains are too short.
Indoors and outdoors, wild animals roam around freely because when
the zoo was started, the animals came but the cages never arrived. People
 458 Wonderland

spy on each other. At the Sanatorium for Active Therapy and Neuro-
biology, or satan for short, the patients drink sulphurous water and
take mud baths; the whole town goes there.
This is a town where people are sent who have problems. The ex-
emplary worker caught distributing food from the back of his truck at an
illegal beer shop, the bureaucrat involved in petty corruption. No one
ever knows who sent them there, and to Alicia they all appear to be cow-
ards. All this is communicated through vivid and at times quite halluci-
natory images. The humor is black and scatological. A local acionado
has made a childrens cartoon lm in which a duck is shat on by a cow
while a cheerful song pronounces Destiny is a fatal voice where con-
formity lies hidden, its course cannot be changed. The children applaud
and explain the moral: Not all those who are covered with shit are bad,
but if you are covered in shit its best to keep cool. The animation, of
course, is crude, but this is visually one of the most original Cuban
lms for many years: the farce has become a bad dream in which every-
one is implicated.
In certain respects, Alicia also harks back to another Cuban comedy
of the 1960s, Julio Garca Espinosas Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin.
Like Espinosas lm, it has a didactic and post-Brechtian approach to
the construction of the narrative, which is constantly interrupted by
two kinds of interpolated sequence. First are a number of ashbacks
that recount the stories of several of the characters Alicia meets in Mara-
villas; second are television programs that Alicia watches on the local
TV station, and that beautifully satirize the bland inanities of ocial
discourse. Garca Espinosa says he saw Alicia very much in terms of the
motto of the opening title, a quote from Lewis Carroll: For, you see, so
many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun
to think that very few things indeed were really impossible. In short, a
surreal allegory on the human beings adaptability, a tale of how, with
the help of opportunists and frauds, a situation could reach such a
point that people adapt to it as if it were all perfectly natural, and thus
become accomplices of the absurd. A little too surrealist, he thought,
but with some brilliant sequences. But he also considers the scandal
that followed to be the result of a process of demonization that befell
the lm at the hands of certain people set on stirring things up, so that
when it was nally screened, people went to see it looking for devils.18
 Wonderland 459

Alicia had in fact been three years in the making, and the script,
which dated from 1988, was read not only by the people at icaic but
also by others outside.19 Perhaps they supposed it to be another farcical
social comedy, of a kind with which the Film Institute had recently been
enjoying a run of popular successes (lms like Se permuta and Pla!),
although one of those involved, Jess Daz, who collaborated on the
script, said that they were clear about the kind of trouble they might be
courting.20 A complex lm to shoot, Alicia was eight months in pre-
production; lming was completed in February 1990, and postproduc-
tion at the end of the year. The country had changed considerably over
this period. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Throughout Eastern Europe,
Communism had collapsed. In Moscow, Gorbachev was hanging on by
the skin of his teeth. Cuba was isolated as never before. What had doubt-
less always been a risky project now emerged as a gloating satire on the
cavernicola, or caveman attitudes of the party orthodoxy, at the very mo-
ment when everything seemed to be collapsing around them.
It was also unusually scatological in its sense of humor, and the shit
hit the proverbial fan immediately after the Berlin Film Festival suc-
cess. According to Garca Espinosa, Alicia aroused the ire in particular
of the then senior party ideologue, Carlos Aldana, who had a number of
video copies made of the lm so certain people could see it.21 Copies of
the copies soon began to proliferate and all sorts of rumors started cir-
culating about hidden connotations in the lm, the satirical targets of its
characters, especially the suggestion that certain gestures that Reynaldo
Miravalles incorporated into the character of the director of the sanato-
rium were reminiscent of Fidel Castro himself, and that the lm was a
direct attack on the Revolution.22 The timing of the episode could hardly
be worse. To confront the mounting economic crisis, the government
had decided on a program of administrative rationalization intended to
save management costs. The decision was taken to merge icaic with
Cuban television and the lm section of the Armed Forces. The politi-
cians were quite unprepared for the response of the lmmakers, who
immediately, including those who were party members, signed an un-
precedented document declaring their total opposition to the plan. The
unity of the Film Institute would force the government to back down.
Manuel Prez subsequently gave an account of the events in an inter-
view in the journal La Gaceta de Cuba:
 460 Wonderland

Reynaldo Miravalles in Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Daniel Daz Torres, 1991)

We got the news, if memory serves, on May 13, and it was published on
the fourteenth. Obviously, we didnt agree with it and the very same
night of the thirteenth we began to meet to see what we could do, and
over the next few days we formed a committee of eighteen compaeros
who took on the burden of writing letters and documents and calling
meetings with the party leadership.23

This group included both party members and others.24 All shared the
feeling that there was more at issue than the economic situation in the
country, which was the given reason for the merger plan, but that there
had been a loss of political condence in the lm institute and its direc-
tion. Their task was therefore to defend both icaics autonomy as a
cultural institution and its position over culture and cinema. I believe,
says Prez, that we did this eectively and intelligently, without ignor-
ing the countrys problems or abandoning what we felt to be our prin-
ciples. This maturity and unity, he adds, was achieved thanks to the
existence and the work of the grupos de creacin.25
Garca Espinosa defended the lm in the highest councils of the
party, and it nally opened in ten cinemas in Havana on June 13, only to
be withdrawn after four days marked by disturbances in the cinemas.
 Wonderland 461

The audience was packed with party militants, to keep as many others
out as possible, and ideological insults were thrown at the screens. The
newspaper Granma condemned the exaggerated pessimism of its po-
litical satire and resolutely rejected its defeatism, hopelessness and bit-
terness.26 The Film Institute responded with a further protest, which
led to the creation of a commission composed of Carlos Aldana, the
countrys senior vice president, Carlos Rafael Rodrguez, and the origi-
nal head of icaic, Alfredo Guevara. It was a very dicult moment,
Prez commented, to be defending the necessity of art and its critical
role in a such a society. To give you an idea of the context, one of the
meetings with the party leadership had to be suspended because the
news arrived of the coup dtat in the Soviet Union. Thats to say that
while we were debating, the last socialist country in Europe disappeared,
and the whole world was waiting for Cuba to join the domino eect.
The commission met twice with the whole of icaic and the exchange
of opinions was said to be very frank. The conict was so entrenched,
however, that it called for the return of Alfredo Guevara as the only
person capable of bringing about a resolution.27 The truth is that the
politicians were hardly prepared for the unprecedented response of
the lmmakers. This show of unity forced an equally unprecedented
retreat. The commission never reported ocially, but shortly afterwards
Garca Espinosa stepped down, Alfredo Guevara took over again as
icaics head, and everyone went back to work. At the same time, Gue-
vara became a member of the central committee of the Cuban Com-
munist Party. There was no victimization of those who had signed the
protest, but Garca Espinosa parted company with icaic and went to
work at the Fundacin para el Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (Foundation
for New Latin American Cinema). One other person involved, Jess Daz,
who collaborated on the script, left Cuba around this time to teach in
Berlin, and would never go back.28

While the Alicia aair was unfolding, Humberto Sols was at work on
El siglo de las luces, completed the following year as crisis continued in
the land (it would get worse before getting better). The lm, an adaptation
of the historical novel by Alejo Carpentier, takes us back to the Havana of
the late eighteenth century and the time of the French Revolution, where
the lives of three ctional young aristocrats, Sofa, Carlos, and Esteban,
are fatefully touched by that of a historical personage, a French overseas
 462 Wonderland

adventurer and revolutionary living in Port-au-Prince by the name of

Victor Hugues (or Hughes). The Frenchman brings them into contact
with the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, whose after-
math draws them in, producing a series of events that carry us to Jacobin
Paris with Esteban, to Spain, where he ends up in prison disillusioned,
and then back to the Caribbean, where Hugues, as Robespierres deputy
in Guadaloupe, takes on an American invasion. (The episode was for-
gotten by historians; Carpentier wrote the novel after hearing about it
in the 1950s.)29 As for Sofa, who hopes for more from Hugues than he
gives her, when the rupture between them comes, she takes o for
Madrid to obtain Estebans freedom, carrying the lm into the territory
of Goyas paintings of the horrors of the second and third of May.
A lm no less ambitious than Cecilia, it was likewise an international
coproduction made for television, and unfortunately suered from the
consequences. Conceived in terms of three episodes running ve and a
half hours, the cinema version, running 120 minutes, is structurally o
balance, a problem aggravated by awkward dubbing of French into Span-
ish, thus leaving Livio Delgados admirable cinematography as the dom-
inant level of eect. Sols made what he calls a personal translation of
the original, tailored to the limitations of his budgeta careful selection
of locations, scenography, and costumes to evoke the symbolism of the
epoch, with the recurrent presence of Masonic columns, guillotines, and
scientic artifacts, dressed by Delgado alternately in long tracking shots,
deep-focus wide shots, and big close-ups, replete with chiaroscuro, an
enclosed atmosphere, and moments of intimacy. Since it is dicult to
imagine a lm about the French Revolution involving Cubans by a
Cuban director not being intended as an allegory on the Cuban Revolu-
tion, it is not surprising that Sols calls this his political testament.30
Behind the historical imagery, the lm operates on two levels. On the
most direct level, it traces the link, harmonious or contradictory, be-
tween social liberation and individual comportment, with characters at
the same time in and out of synchronization with social reality. Punctu-
ating this narrative is a series of letters from Esteban to Sofa in which
he traces his growing disillusionletters that are neither in the novel
nor in the original script, but which were added in postproduction. Here
Esteban speaks of the end of modernity, again the failure of the En-
lightenment idea of utopia, and declares that politics is an abomina-
tion, the obscene manipulation of history. On this second level, where
 Wonderland 463

the gure of Victor Hugues merges with Robespierre, there is an alle-

gory on the present day that no one spoke about.

The following year, Alea returned to the screens with a lm that was
equally critical but made only the slightest allusion to Castro. Fresa y
chocolate (Strawberry and chocolate) was based on a short story by Senel
Paz, who also wrote the script; when the lm was set to start shooting
and Alea was diagnosed with cancer, Juan Carlos Tabo joined him as
codirector. Tabo and Alea later explained how their codirection worked.31
First of all, Tabo was familiar with the script, since theyd worked on it
together in the grupo de creacin. This enabled him to take over the
preparation for the shoot while Titn was undergoing surgery. On the set,
the problem of a possible dichotomy of styles was obviated by the active
participation of the cinematographer Mayito. Titn would set up the
shots in the morning and Tabo would complete them in the afternoon;
the next morning Titn would see the rushes and reshoot anything that
seemed to him necessary. The lm thus remained essentially Titns, in
its vision and its realization, and Tabo thus became the most seless of
Titns collaborators.
Near the beginning of Fresa y chocolate, Diego, a gay photographer
and art critic, puts on a recording of Maria Callas to entertain his guest
David, a university student and Young Communist militant whom he
has just picked up. God, what a voice! he sighs. Why cant this island
produce a voice like that? We need another voice so badly, huh? Weve
had enough of Mara Remol! Never mind who that is, for the Cuban
audience there is an obvious double entendre. We are back in the irrev-
erent and rebellious world of the young artists of the late 1980salthough
the lm is nominally set in 1979, shortly after the fall of Somoza, and evi-
dently lmed in contemporary Havana, where the buildings are reach-
ing an advanced state of disrepair. This deliberate blurring of the his-
torical moment (which is noted by several commentators) has the eect
of intensifying the lms sense of contemporaneity. The students in the
university common room watch a documentary about the overthrow of
the Nicaragua dictator, which, according to the commentary, took place
a few months earlier, but in the streets outside, a squealing pig being
carried up a staircase to be slaughtered presents an image of the hard-
ships of the Special Period. In the view of a critic writing in La Gaceta
de Cuba, Jorge Yglesias, who traces a number of mixed historical signals
 464 Wonderland

throughout the lm, The conuence of times past with the present
gives Fresa y chocolate its particular character and perhaps a more pro-
found and inclusive dimension.32
If Fresa y chocolate caused a stir by making its central character, for
the rst time in Cuban cinema, a gay man, its phenomenal successit
ran in Havana for eight monthscertainly suggests that it touched a
deep nerve in the social body. As Ian Lumsden has written, It un-
leashed a popular discourse about a culturally tabooed and politically
repressed issue that went beyond the connes of the lm itself.33 It is
not, however, a gay lm in the regular sense at all, and not because the
authors were straight. The tale of friendship between David, a young
man of solid Marxist beliefs, and Diego, a homosexual poorly looked
on by society, becomes the dramaturgical premise for something much
more unfashionable, a hard-core political lm, brimming with explicit
dialogue about censorship, Marxism-Leninism, nationalism, aesthetics,
and not least, sexuality. The narrative takes the form, as John Hess has
observed, of a kind of Cuban bildungsromanthe education of an in-
nocent in the ways of the world; in this case, the cultural, political, and
sexual education of a patriotic young Cuban male growing up at any
time since the Revolution (hence with broad appeal across the genera-
tions), but with a twist: sidestepping the conventional expectations of
the genre, it is a cultured bourgeois homosexualalthough their re-
lationship remains unconsummatedwho educates the ideologically
challenged peasant student.34
If Diego (a amboyant performance by Jorge Perugorra) aunts his
sexuality with outrageous good humor, he does so with a sense of polit-
ical purpose. He is not a loca (a queen)although he can quite well
play the partbut in Hesss phrase, a feminized lover of art and cul-
ture.35 There is some debate among writers on the lm about the pre-
cise location of Diegos sexuality within Cuban homosexual culture (and
for some foreign viewers Perugorra overacts), but the crux is that to be
gay for Diego is not just a question of sexuality; it is also to be in pos-
session of a cultural tradition in which the father of Cuban nationalism,
Jos Mart, rubs shoulders with the great Cuban writer Lezama Lima,
whom he calls a universal Cuban, whose novel Paradiso had been sup-
pressed in Cuba because of its portrayal of homosexuality; who in turn
rubs shoulders with John Donne and Cavafy, Oscar Wilde, Gide, and
Lorca. Diegos sense of Cuban culture is all-inclusive and not at all
 Wonderland 465

chauvinistic. (Similarly, his musical tastes run from opera to the piano
dances of the Cuban composers Cervantes and Lecuona.) His rst crit-
icism of the party is that what it tries to repress is imagination, and it
can only think of art in terms of either propaganda or mere decoration.
As he protests to his neighbor Nancy, Art is not for sending messages,
its for feeling and thinking. Messages are for the radio. What he most
opposes in the system is the regimentation of thought, as he declares
in another scene to David:

I also had dreams. When I was fourteen I joined the literacy campaign.
Because I wanted to. I went to pick coee in the hills, and studied to be a
teacher. What happened? This head of mine thinks, and anyone who
doesnt say yes to everything, they reject.

In short, Diego challenges Davids assumption that because hes gay he

couldnt be a revolutionary, and isnt patriotiche defends the country
so that people know whats good about it. I dont want the Americans
or anyone coming to tell us what we have to dojust as he also dis-
misses the explanations of homosexuality that David draws from the
political textbooks; and when David accuses him of always thinking about
men, he replies, angrily, I think about men when its time to think
about men! Like you think about women, which David nds he cannot
answer.
Diego and David belong to dierent fractions within the society that
appear to repel each other; they meet when Diego picks up David in the
Coppelia, Havanas famous open-air ice-cream parlor, which lends the
lm its richly ironic title. Strawberry, in what Yglesias punningly calls
dogmatic-machista heraldry (la herldica dogmtico-machista), signi-
es ideological weakness and homosexuality, while chocolate signies
manhood and straight-thinking; on the other hand, says Yglesias, they
are also complimentary, and the two avors are often combined. The
most signicant historical detail in this scene comes from the books, in-
cluding a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, with which Diego provocatively
tries to tempt Davids interest: unobtainable editions of literature con-
demned as counterrevolutionary, which represent for David, a would-be
writer, both the fear of and fascination with the Other that equally marks
his attitude toward Diego himself. The mix of historical references con-
tinues when Diego returns to his guarida (den) and utters expressions
that belong more to the present than to ten or fteen years earlier, while
 466 Wonderland

the propaganda posters on the staircase of the house, Yglesias notes,

belong to the 1980s. This word guarida introduces another history: ac-
cording to Emilio Bejel, writing about the lm in Casa de las Amricas,
the adoption of the word by homosexuals to refer to the places where
they lived and met, goes back to the 1880s.36 Indeed, Diegos guarida,
cluttered with Cuban iconography spanning at least a century, recalls
the descriptions of Julin del Casal (186393) as a bourgeois aesthete
the rst Cuban poet to be stigmatized as a homosexual. As Hess de-
scribes the scene, The rst time David enters this space, he stands in
awe. His eyes, in a clearly established point-of-view shot, lovingly scan
the walls, covered with all manner of art (photos, paintings, clippings
from periodicals, parts of colonial wrought-iron decorations, wooden
cherubs and angels) and the shelves lled with books, magazines, sound
tapes, small gures and other objets dartand, in a corner, a large
gure of a saint.37 By bringing this forbidden world to the screen, Fresa y
chocolate represents what Bejel calls a coming out of the Cuban homo-
sexual subject, an emergence from private to public space, and from a
negative denition and situation, oppressed and hidden, to greater ac-
ceptance, or at least less concealed, with consequences not just for gays
but for Cuban society as a whole.
David (sensitively played by Vladimir Cruz) is fascinated by Diego
and initially reluctant to get mixed up with him. He is given the excuse
he needs to go and see him again by his university friend Miguel, a
party activist to whom David mentions that Diego is preparing an exhi-
bition of sculptures by the latters friend Germn (who is indeed a loca)
and with the possible support of an unnamed embassy; Miguel gives
David the mission of spying on Diego, a mission he will soon become
reluctant to fulll. Catching sight of his reection in a shopwindow as
he saunters along the street gives him a start that pulls him out of his
daydreams, as he asks himself what kind of hijo de puta behaves like that.
If the shot evokes Sergio walking around Havana in Memorias del sub-
desarrollo, reminding the viewer of another would-be writers ideological
dilemma, it also shows Alea as a lmmaker in constant dialogue with
himself and his world.
Germns sculptures, which are currently housed in Diegos apart-
ment, are pastiche saints in the satiric style of the late 1980s, including
one of Karl Marx with a crown of thorns. This makes them, to Diego at
least, semisacred objects, cousins to the saints that both he and Nancy
 Wonderland 467

keep in their rooms and whom they look upon to serve their interests.
As Steve Wilkinson observes in another account of the lm, the troubles
Diego suers at the hands of the authorities are not simply due to his
open homosexuality, but follow from his insistence on writing to the
authorities to complain when Germns exhibition is threatened with a
ban unless certain sculptures are withdrawn.38 Germn, who complies,
is promised a trip to Mexico in reward, while Diego loses his job and, at
the end of the lm, follows the only option left to him, to leave the
country. (Germn argues with Diego, tells him he should be realistic,
that two or three works of art are not worth the trouble, before hysteri-
cally putting an end to the argument by smashing up the Karl Marx
while crying, Its mine! Its mine! Diegos doppelgnger, his attitude
would seem to conrm Wilkinsons argument that what the Cuban regime
punishes is not homosexuality per se but noncompliance with author-
ity; but it also shows the personal cost of his acquiescence, the loss of
self-respect and mature identity in which the character momentarily
regresses to the behavior of the frustrated child.)
Clearly, Fresa y chocolate is not just about the homophobia of the
Cuban Communist Party, but also a critique of its aesthetic puritanism,
and the suppression of artistic voices considered by authority as deviant.
If the association of homosexuality with art and art with deviance is
not something dreamed up by a new breed of communist hard-liners
but, as elsewhere, has long existed within Cuban culture, the exiled
Cuban writer Ren Vsquez Daz believes it has something to do with a
subtle aspect of our machismo: books are not written with balls
thats something done by comemierdas (i.e., faggots).39 Senel Paz en-
countered this attitude growing up in the 1960s: I started to recite
things in school assemblies. Everything was going well until some friends
of my sister said one day that anyone who read poems in assembly or
wrote plays was a maricna queer. I stopped doing those things.40 In
short, the Revolution, which was built on a strong dose of machismo,
inherited a link between homophobia and cultural suspicion, which
boiled over in the umap camps that David and Diego argue about in
the lm. Set up in 1965, and supposed by Cubanologists to have been
modeled on the Soviet Gulag, these camps were lled by drafting gays
and other social deviants, and, according to one account, their treat-
ment was brutal enough that some of the ocers were subsequently
court-martialed. When numbers of intellectuals, artists, and academics
 468 Wonderland

were rounded up on account of their homosexuality, there were protests

by organizations like uneac and icaic. Castro was persuaded that the
situation was scandalous, and in 1967 the umaps were disbanded.41 In
the lm, it is the young communist David who brings up the subject of
the umaps in arguing with Diego about the fundamental ethics of the
Revolution: What Im trying to say is that its lamentable but under-
standable if mistakes are made like sending Pablito Milans to the
umap. This admission comes as a dramatic revelation not because the
fact was unknown but because of the public nature of the forum in
which it is here acknowledged, and not least by invoking the name of
one of the leading singers of the Nueva Trova.
At this point, the lm bears on the unwritten history of icaic itself,
with its homophilic culture that no one ever talked about publicly, but
that was common knowledge to anyone on familiar terms with the insti-
tute as a communitya silence that suggests that while open repression
of gays was brought to an end, enough of a homophobic atmosphere per-
sisted outside cultural institutions like icaic to keep it a hidden topic,
and to ensure that Cuban cinema refrained from bringing gay subjects to
the screen until very late in the day, and after many lmmakers elsewhere
in Latin America. The rst examples are the theme of homosexuality in
Adorables mentiras and a secondary character in La bella del Alhambra.
But now, after the Alicia aair, a lm comes along that openly eschews
self-censorship and has clearly not been censored. The force of the mo-
ment is underlined by Diegos deant response to Davids admission
about the singer: Not only him! What of all the locas who dont sing!
David presses his point: The mistakes are not the Revolution. Theyre
part of the Revolution, but not the whole of it, do you see? But Diego
has the last word: And the bill, who should that go to? Whos going to
answer for them?
The introduction of Mirta Ibarra as Nancy from Adorables mentiras
was the idea of Senel Paz. It not only creates a nexus between the two
lms but opens up the story on which Fresa y chocolate is based by dou-
bling the prejudices and rejection directed to the homosexual with those
directed at a fallen woman, who is now a black marketeer prone to sui-
cidal depression, here attempting to kill herself again. Already known to
the audience as a woman full of human warmth and a spirit of inde-
pendence, struggling not to succumb to the abyss, Nancy has the eect
of underlining Davids innocence. David, who as yet knows nothing of
 Wonderland 469

Nancys past, arrives on the scene just as she is being carried down to
the ambulance; Diego pulls him along, knowing that as a good revolu-
tionary he will be ready to give his blood at the hospital, an act that will
afterwards serve to draw him closer to her suering. When Diego tells
David she has done it ve times before, the spectator who remembers
Adorables mentiras may also recall Nancys bitterness, which she shares
in that lm with Sissy: When they say theres no prostitution here, I
want to hide under the bed and stay there. Its my fault theyre lying.
Thats why they hate me. I wasnt meant to be a whore. I was meant to
be an agronomist. But this comic-pathetic confession is ambiguous,
and in neither lm do we ever see Nancy turning tricksshe is not the
kind of prostitute catering to the tourist trade, known as the jinetera,
who reemerged in the 1990s, but a woman who claims the same sexual
freedom as men, and pays the price of sexual liberation in a machista
society: she is made to feel like a whore. Bejel describes her as an exam-
ple of what Marxism calls the lumpen, because she doesnt work, enjoys
promiscuity, and lives from illegal dollar trading, and the lm claims a
space for this lumpen too.42 As Ibarra puts it, her character is something
of an everywoman who personies the crisis of the country.43
There are several ways of mapping the relationships between the var-
ious characters. Hess notes that the lm establishes clear oppositions
between two pairs, one male, the other female.44 On the one hand are
Miguel, the Communist macho, and Diego, the cultured gay who has
lost his illusions about the revolution. On the other are Nancy and
Vivian, Davids girlfriend from the opening sequence, who throws him
over to marry an older and more successful man because she wants to
live well and begin a family immediately. Davids trajectory carries
him from Miguel to Diego and from Vivian to Nancy. But these two
pairs can also be mapped across the genders: Miguel and Vivian are
conformists who accept their prescribed conventional sex rolesthus
representing not revolutionary values but the continuance of small-
minded conservative values within the Revolution. On the other hand,
Diego and Nancy are outsiders, nonconformists, and, in their dierent
ways, rebels. They are also warm, loving, sensitive, eclectic in their
tastes . . . who see the Revolution in terms of the personal and their lost
ideals.45 And in the middle, between them all, is David.
Nancys presence transforms a story of male bonding into a triangle,
in which David becomes an object of desire for both Diego and herself.
 470 Wonderland

David is thus the central gure in two triangles, Miguel-David-Diego,

and Diego-David-Nancy, not to mention a third, Vivian-David-Nancy.
David is a disputed object body and soul. Miguel tries to hold David to
a closed and homophobic posture, while Diego aspires to convert him
to a broader cultural vision that includes the acceptance of homosexu-
ality. As Diego protests to David, the last thing he wants to do is leave: I
form part of this country whatever they like and I have the right to do
things for it. Im not going away! Let them burn my ass! Coo, without
me theres a piece of earth missing. The only terrain that allows any
mediation between these positions is the discourse of patriotism and
nationhood, where in the end David will recognize the natural justice of
Diegos inclusive and eclectic vision of Cuban culture and nationhood.
At the same time, David is also desired sexually by both Diego and
Nancy, a rivalry in which heterosexuality is victorious, thus framing the
gay theme within a hetero narrativeas some critics outside Cuba have
chargedin which a neurotic woman rescues David from the fate of
a homosexual relationship.46 Worse still, she does so only after Diego
has renounced his own claims. As Bejel puts it, Diego is the one who
cedes, even suggesting to Nancy that she initiate David sexually.47 This
initially oends her, because it implies shes a simple puta; nevertheless,
it coincides with her desire, and Nancy prays to her Santa Brbara that
David should nd her attractive. Consummation takes place in Diegos
own bed.
This turns of events represents a problem for several writers, includ-
ing Hess, who believes that the oppositions of sexuality that Alea sets up
are in the end normalized by Davids heterosexual initiation, and the
lms clichd melodrama, whatever the directors intent, reproduces
Cubas homophobic and sexist ideologies.48 Bejel, too, considers that
the plot falls back too easily on the well-tried happy ending of hetero-
sexual lovers, the man happily nding the woman he needs, leaving the
homosexual alone and unhappy.49 This is not to say that nothing fun-
damental has changed, that when David and Diego nally hug each
other on the eve of Diegos departurea hug that also embraces the
spectator in a powerful release of sympathetic human feelingit makes
no larger dierence. Moreover, the closure of this ending is far from
complete, since both David and Diego are left in quite dierent situa-
tions from where they started. While Diego leaves to face a wholly un-
certain future, it is dicult to believe that Davids relationship with Nancy,
 Wonderland 471

a woman many years his senior, a black marketeer and a religious be-
liever, can possibly last. As Hess puts it: It is hard to imagine how such
contradictory people might live in Cuba, how David might remain a
member of the Communist Party while also remaining true to Nancy.
Worse still, he has been attacked by Miguel, who calls him a maricn
and threatens political consequences: such serious charges would cer-
tainly have damaged if not destroyed a young man like Davids career,
especially in 1979 when the lm is set.50 (One can imagine just such a
mistake as the reason why Alejandro, in Papeles secundarios, was ban-
ished to the provinces.)
The hug embodies a shift in values that can be located in the dier-
ence between Miguels loss and Diegos symbolic gain. As Bejel sees it,
From the symbolic point of view, what is in play is a conception of na-
tionality in transitionNancy and Diego both symbolize elements in
Cuban society that the lm suggests should be integrated into a new
conception of the nation. In short, Diego has not lost David, because
he has given him an anti-machista vision of society; and, in ceding place
to Nancy, Diego himself passes to another value system that allows this
act of altruism. Thus, Bejel locates this allegory of the nation, which,
like other classic examples of national allegory is based on the symbolic
representation of doomed or frustrated desire, in the triangulations be-
tween the characters. If we conceive Fresa y chocolate as a national alle-
gory in which the desires of sexual attraction or friendship serve as
symbolic acts in the problematic of a historical subtext, then we shall be
in a better position to understand the importance of the triangular re-
lations in this workthe conicts between the characters are symbolic
representations of political and ideological struggles in the society (using
the term symbolic representation in [Fredric] Jamesons sense, and not
in the sense of a mimetic representation of so-called reality.51 On
this reading, if the symbolism of the struggle in the triangle of Miguel-
David-Diego is obvious, that of Diego-David-Nancy is not so clear.
How to interpret Nancys role in this national allegory? The happy
ending is a stratagem that hides other possible interpretations. When
David gives blood to help save Nancys life, as Diego has done before
him, they both establish a relation of gift giving toward Nancy that con-
tributes to her well-being. Can Nancy be seen as the part of the nation
that asks to be saved from suicide? Could one say that Diego and David
must ally themselves in order that this salvation can be achieved? But
 472 Wonderland

this alliance is not fullledDiego and David end up separating, and

Diegos exile is a truncated and impossible solution.
Fresa y chocolate took top prize at both the Havana Film Festival in
1993 and in Berlin in 1994, and was bought by Miramax for distribution
in the United States, allowing Hollywood to pay homage to Alea, who
was ill with cancer, and at the same time send a message of solidarity to
the beleaguered Cuban lmmakers by nominating it for an Oscar as
Best Foreign Film. In many ways a breakthrough lm, it played very dif-
ferently, however, to audiences at home and abroad. In Cuba, its run-
away popularity gave it the largest-ever audience for a Cuban lm in the
shortest period of time, provoking a commotion that took on the di-
mensions of a sociological phenomenon.52 (The building where it was
lmed now houses a paladar, one of the private restaurants permitted
under the economic liberalization of the mid-1990s.) Alea told a Span-
ish journalist when the lm opened in Madrid that he was taken by
surprise, but realized that people reacted like that because they had
the need to hear these things out loud, not just whispered in corridors
and cafs. Its a lm that says aloud what many people think but dont
dare utter. I think that seeing it becomes a huge liberation for the spec-
tator, whom it allows to openly share these ideas.53 There can be no
better description of the role that Cuban cinema plays as a surrogate
public sphere. A lm cannot replace the need for public speech, but it
can feed it. In this case, the eect is powerful enough to be remarked by
a foreign observer. Both homosexuals and homosexual oppression,
says Lumsden, became visible in a totally new way, which gives him
the impression that the release of the lm was also a concession by the
regime that its homophobic policies have been counterproductive.54
However, Fresa y chocolate was not (and not intended as) a cam-
paigning lm, but as an intervention in a national debate that by the
time the lm was made had already begun to change signicantly. As
another foreign observer reports, life for gays had improved long before
the lm was made. The government had reviewed the issue in the mid-
1980s, and in 1988 repealed public ostentation laws that had been in
force since 1938long before the Revolution. Police were ordered to
stop harassing people for their appearance; the law now only prohibited
homosexual acts that were violent, coercive, or with underage persons.
According to a report in 1988 by the National Lawyers Guild (of Amer-
ica), based on interviews with gay men and lesbians: They are not fear-
 Wonderland 473

ful of being identied as homosexual and have many more opportunities

for employment. Continued homophobia is blamed on societal values
and not on ocial policy.55 Four years later, as Alea started work on the
lm, a play by Senel Paz based on the same story opened in Havana,
where it ran for two months, and Fidel Castro declared he was abso-
lutely opposed to all forms of oppression, contempt, scorn, or discrimi-
nation with regard to homosexuals.56 What Alea did was seize the mo-
ment to test the sincerity of this mood of liberalism by xing it in the
eye. In the view of Reynaldo Gonzlez, who accepts that it could not have
been shown without approval, Fresa y chocolate goes much further than
any ocial ideology and digs deeper than any Cuban lm before it: it
points an accusing nger at intolerance in its broadest form and pro-
vokes reections that go much beyond the anguish of a particular mar-
ginalized community; in short, it was a highly liberating lm.57
Outside Cuba, the lm repeated the achievement of Memorias del
subdesarrollo twenty-ve years earlier, which was to center attention on
Cuba by breaking the stereotypes to which the island was subjected in
the media at large, an eect that inevitably elicits varied and contradic-
tory responses conditioned by the proclivities of dierent audiences. At
the showcase Berlin Film Festival, according to the Spanish lm critic
ngel Fernndez-Santos, this poor lm, made for threepence, sur-
passed the opulent lms of the West in aesthetic and moral richness.58
On the other hand, some critics noted that it had none of the Brechtian
distancing devices of earlier lms like Memorias . . . or Hasta cierto punto,
with the implication that Alea was sliding back into the conventions of
European art cinema, although the same had been said of La ltima
cena. As for the United States, Hess reported that my small town video
store has eight copies and I found the sound track at Tower Records,
while Siskel and Ebert gave it Two Thumbs Up. Here, where it was
perceived as an emotional melodrama in which patriarchy takes a severe
beating although it sneaks back in at the end, conventional stereotypes,
such as the hooker with a heart of gold and the cultured gay man, con-
tribute[d] much to the lms popularity.59
These dierences only conrm the paradox of the screen as a repre-
sentational spacethat the image itself is one thing, but how it is read
depends in critical ways on the space between the screen and the viewers
eyes, and thus, in common parlance, where he or she is coming from.
Observing these discrepancies, Hess reminds us that in certain societies
 474 Wonderland

audiences become adept at reading subtleties in conventional and stereo-

typed representations when these are the only kind permitted, as in
much of Eastern European cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, or Brazilian
Tropicalism in the same period. Here local audiences see certain lms
as resistant and progressive, while in other countries the stereotypes
seems to weaken their element of social critique.60 Alea knows that even
though the lm is a coproduction and therefore addressed to an inter-
national audience, the foreign viewer can hardly have the same invest-
ment in it, emotionally, ideologically, and politically, as the primary audi-
ence at homea dierence complicated in this case by the subject matter,
since discourses of sexuality have evolved rather dierently within Cuba
and beyond.
However, for one small group, dispersed but vocal, Fresa y chocolate
revived a ten-year-old controversy around a documentary, Improper Con-
duct, by Aleas youthful collaborator Nstor Almendros, which indicted
the Cuban regime as homophobic, sexist, racist, and totalitarian. Alea
had anticipated this response. Fresa y chocolate was in preparation when
he heard of the death of Almendros, with whom he made his rst lms
on 8 mm back in the 1940s. He considered Improper Conduct, which
consists of a series of interviews about the repression of homosexuals in
the 1960s, some honest, some grossly exaggerated, a very crude and
schematic simplication of reality, very manipulative, like a piece of so-
cialist realism in reverse, and agreed that since one could hardly make
a lm on the theme of homosexuality in Cuba without thinking of what
Nstor had done, Fresa y chocolate was in a way a reply to Conducta im-
propia.61 (Lumsdena North American gayconsiders Almendross
lm particularly misleading in its use of emotive analogies to Pinochets
Chile, Nazi Germany, and Stalins Russia.)62 In short, when a protest
letter was sent to Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Associa-
tion of America (mpaa), signed by such luminaries as Cabrera Infante
and Andy Garca, charging Fresa y chocolate with being an apologia for
the Cuban regime and attempting to impede Aleas Oscar nomination,
the answer had already be sent.

In order to shoot Fresa y chocolate, Tabo had interrupted the editing of

his own lm, El elefante y la bicicleta (The Elephant and the Bicycle),
which came out in 1994, and probably suered as a result of the inter-
ruption. A pity, says the Cuban critic Julio Csar Aguillera, that a lm
 Wonderland 475

with such a good dramaturgical idea dissolves into a complicated suc-

cession of gags and uneven subplots that fail to establish solid links be-
tween them.63 Made to celebrate the centenary of cinema, a recent writer
on political cinema, Mike Wayne, sees it as an extended, self-reexive
meditation on cinema and society, adding that it seems like a humor-
ous commentary on Aleas The Viewers Dialectic: a projectionist brings
cinema to a symbolic island called La Fe (Faith) for the rst time in the
year 1925.64 Taking its title from the pre-credits sequence, in which a
classroom full of children unwittingly evoke Hamlets conversation with
Polonius about the shapes to be seen in a certain cloudcamel, weasel,
or whale, or, in this case, elephant or bicyclethe lm is full of allusions
to the history of cinema from a decidedly Latin American perspective.
The projectionist has brought a single lm, which recounts the leg-
end of Robin Hood. The audience is completely entranced, as they begin
to see themselves as the characters on the screenwho are played by
the same actors as various characters on the island. They clamor to see
the lm again and again, confusing the events on the screen with events
in their lives. The second night the lm is screened the story shifts to a
Latin American locationthe outlaws become native Indians, the au-
thorities are transformed into the white Spanish colonizersand the
lm has acquired a sound track. It is next recongured as a tale of the
Mexican Revolution, then becomes a story of the Brazilian serto in
homage to Glauber Rocha, the characters always undergoing wondrous
transformations as the erstwhile Robin Hood turns up as the bandit
Corisco from Antonio das Mortes, or Friar Tuck turns into a revolution-
ary priest urging his comrades to change themselves in order to change
the world. In the world of La Fe, which, of course, represents Cuba it-
self, the arrival of the Revolution occasions an homage to Eisensteins
October.
In a study of the dialectics of third cinema, Mike Wayne sees the lm
in terms of Aleas argument that the spectacle of cinema ought to func-
tion like an interruption of normal life in which real life is transgured
into reel life in such a way as to make the audience reconsider their
values, a process metaphorically congured here in the parallels be-
tween the characters on the island and in the lms they watch, and their
confusion over the events in their own lives and those that occur in the
lmsa confusion that comes from the spectators act of identication
with the screen world. Aleas aesthetic is about the capacity of cinema to
 476 Wonderland

make this a productive identication that feeds the need for social
change. The last of the lm within the lms cinematic transformations is
a projection of the dilemma of Cuba in the 1990s as the triumph of the
revolution is celebrated in a parody of the Soviet musicalwhereupon
the projector breaks down. When the projectionist manages to solve the
problem by adapting the damaged part from a printing machine, the
audience returns to the cinema anxious to see how the lm ends. As the
screen lights up, what they see is a frontal shot of an audience looking
directly at camera, out into the audience watching them. Again them-
selves. Up on the screen, some of the audience in the lm within the
lm stir restlessly and declare themselves bored with looking at these
people who are looking at them. But Doa Illuminada, the symbolically
named blind teacher from the classroom at the very beginning, tells them
to wait, declaring that she wants to see what they [the watching audi-
ence] do! This, concludes Wayne, is precisely what we, the real audi-
ence, demand of the characters: we go to the cinema to see what they
do.65 Obviously this ending has a dierent eect when seen in Cuba, by
an audience that has recognized itself on the screen, than it does, say,
late at night on British television, where it functions as little more than
an amusing existential conundrum.
With the huge success of Fresa y chocolate abroad, Alea was soon at
work on his last lm, Guantanamera, another Spanish coproduction,
again selessly codirected by Juan Carlos Tabo. The eponymous song of
the title is an old favorite. Back in the 1930s, it was the theme tune of the
popular singer Joseito Fernndez, when he had a weekly radio program
and used it to improvise a witty commentary on current events. Here it
fullls the function of a kind of Greekor Brechtianchorus, punc-
tuating the journey of a corpse from one end of the island to the other
in a cross between a black comedy and a road movie. The humor of
death is another of Aleas favorite themes.
The corpse in question is the aunt of the provincial funeral director
in her home town of Guantnamo, where she dies while on a visit, but
since she has long lived in Havana she must now be taken back there for
burial. Her nephew uses the occasion to prove his management skills,
according to his theory that the only way to keep the funeral services
within their quota of gasoline in such a situation is to organize a relay
from one provincial capital to the next. The narrative skillfully inter-
twines the mishaps along the way with the aairs of a truck driver (Jorge
 Wonderland 477

Perugorra) and his involvement with the bureaucrats wife (Mirta

Ibarra). But at the heart of the lm, its real protagonist, is an almost
silent character, the old musician who was once the aunts lover, whom
she hasnt seen since their youth, and in whose arms she dies at the start
of the lm. He, as the cortge makes its way across the island, keeps see-
ing the image of his lover as a young girl in a photograph, who rst mate-
rializes in front of his eyes standing beneath a placard with the old revo-
lutionary slogan, Revolucin o Muerte!, stationed under the word death.
This was not the only political allusion that oended the orthodox, for
the corpse inevitably followed the same route as the guerrilla army back
in 1958 on its march to Havana and the triumph of the Revolution.
This time the party orthodox were prepared, and when it opened in
Havana a few days before the 1995 lm festival, to immediate popular
approval, it was disparaged by critics for not achieving the same sub-
limity as Aleas success of the 1960s, La muerte de un burcrata. Some
even complained that it was out of date before it was made, citing the
scene of illicit dollar trading, which they claimed was a falsication of
reality since the dollar had been legalized, an objection made in bad faith
because legalization of the dollar was only introduced after the lm had
been shot. The public took a dierent view, taking it as a wistful lm
but not one of resignation and negativity, and Guantanamera justiably
scored a popular success. It is also a valedictory lm, not to be lightly
dismissed, by a dying director involved in a personal dialogue with his
audience. Aleas cinema is always one of individual exorcism, played out
in dierent keys, on themes that are chosen because they coincided with
popular experience. Sergio in Memorias, for example, can be seen as his
own alter ego, but the popular appeal of the lm came from the fact that
what intellectuals in Latin America call the desgarramiento, the rupture,
the breakdown of the familiar vocabulary of existence in the face of
revolutionary change, is not a monopoly of theirs; everyone is con-
fronted with the same problem of the need for the personal reconstruc-
tion of values. Something similar is true here. In Guantanamera, Alea
seized the moment in order to exorcise his private experience one last
time, to joke about death in the teeth of it. But while the private subject
of the lm is his own approaching end, he turns it into a dance with an-
other, more symbolic death. In the lms most beautiful sequence, as
the countryside is drenched in tropical rain, a voice-o recounts the
legend of the Afro-Cuban deity Iku: Olo it was who gave life to man
 478 Wonderland

and woman, but he forgot to create death. People grew old but didnt
die, and they kept following the old laws. The young cried out to Olo,
who began to feel old himself, and unable to deal with the problem, so
he called on Iku to nd a solution. Iku caused it to rain for thirty days
and nights. Only the young, who were able to climb the trees and the
mountains, survived, and then, when the ood cleared and they came
down, they saw that the earth was clean and beautiful, and gave thanks
to Olo for bringing an end to immortality. The metaphor is crystal
clear: it is an allegory on the irony that the same man who brought Cuba
to Revolution may now be forced to see it o. But spoken wistfully, the
dialogue with death turns into a dialogue with a dream of life: a legend
talking of mortality that at the same time celebrates the vigor of the
young. Alea died a few months after the lms Havana premiere.
Garca Espinosa chose a less explicit approach for Reina y Rey (Queen
and king, 1994). An homage to neorealism, this is a latter-day Cuban
version of Vittorio De Sicas Umberto D. of 1952, the story of an old
woman and her dog in the Havana of the Special Period. Reina, desper-
ate to feed Rey, eventually bows to the inevitable and takes him to the
dog pound, only shrinking back at the last moment from abandoning
him to a miserable end; but then he runs away, to forage with other
strays on the citys rubbish tips, perhaps even to be eaten by other starv-
ing dogs. Reina is left alone in the house where she was once the servant
of a family who abandoned Cuba for Miami, who now return on a visit.
They try to persuade her to go back with them to the States and her job
as their servant, and cannot understand why she declines the oer. A
simple and sentimental tale, Colina considers the attempt to transplant
postwar Rome to the Special Period to be a case of nostalgia.66 The most
striking images in the lm are those of Havana itself. Even without see-
ing the worst dilapidation, these images of the dog pound, the rubbish
tip, and the railway sidings (where Reina takes a seat in an old railway
carriage and enjoys a moment of private fantasy) amount to a quite novel
representation of the city, of its interstitial spaces of abandonment, a
visual guration common enough in the case of other cities and other
cinemas but not seen in Cuban cinema until recently. In fact, Havana
has often been a character in its own right in Cuban cinema. In lms
like Memorias del subdesarrollo of 1967, Hasta cierto punto in the early
1970s, Retrato de Teresa and Se permuta (House for swap) ten or a dozen
years later, the city becomes, in all its social and architectural diversity,
 Wonderland 479

the visual inscription of the Revolution, and the Revolution, in a phrase

this writer has heard used in conversation more than once, is like
a mirror in which you see your own reection. But in several lms of
the mid-1990s, the citys appearance has become instantly haunting.
In Madagascar (1994) and La ola (The wave, 1995), for example, pho-
tographed by Ral Prez Ureta and Santiago Yanez, respectively, the city
becomes a landscape of existential crisis, disappointment, and internal
spiritual exile, and its limpid cinematography emerges as the most sen-
tient aspect of Cuban cinema in the 1990s.

By the middle of the decade there were signicant signs of economic

change. As well as legalization of the dollar in 1993, which halted ina-
tion in the black market, a series of staggered reforms to the system began
in 1992 with a new constitution, which, among other things, modied
the concept of property, allowing for certain kinds of small-scale private
ownership and large-scale mixed enterprises with foreign companies. A
year later, land ownership passed to agricultural cooperatives, and self-
employment was permitted. Markets were introduced in 1994 for agri-
cultural produce and industrial and artisanal products, and the follow-
ing year saw a new law on foreign investment, extending the entry of
foreign capital into all sectors of the economy except for public health,
education, and the Armed Forces, subject to various controls. The ob-
ject was to stimulate economic growth by inviting foreign investment in
modernization, especially in key dollar-earning sectors such as tourism.
In whatever way these moves were construed abroad, at home it was
widely understood that there was no intention of abandoning socialist
principles, or of sacricing the egalitarian gains of the Revolution on
the altar of capitalism and the free market. A transition was beginning,
but not one that was intended to lead to the abdication of socialist
power. Nevertheless, it meant that the state had decided to adjust its
behavior toward the economy and accept a transformation of the social
environment, an alteration in the relations between State and society
that was argued by some to constitute the creation of an apparently
contradictory animal, a socialist civil society.
In this new situation, the problem for the lmmakers who were once
in the vanguard of revolutionary culture was icaics own internal loss
of dynamic. The Institute was now held back by the inbuilt delay mech-
anism of production, the long wait between the original conception of a
 480 Wonderland

lm and getting it to the screen, exacerbated by the economic crisis. In

1996, the Institute failed to complete any new feature lms, and although
new productions were already in the pipeline, there was a growing sense
that the Institute was simply lurching from one crisis to another, more
protracted, and potentially more fatal. A disillusion that, as in the coun-
try at large, only added to the diculties. Between 1981 and 1990, icaic
had earned approximately $7.7 million in hard currency, of which $5.9
million came from lm sales and distribution, mainly in Western Europe,
and the remaining $1.8 millionjust under a quarterfrom service
fees. In 1993, the proportions had changed, with service-fee revenues of
$454,000 coming out roughly equal to earnings from international sales
and distribution.67 Reduced levels of production made it unlikely that
this trend could be reversed, and with the shift to self-nancing, these
earnings were not sucient to sustain icaic as a signicant producer.
The only quick answer in these conditions was to try and build on the
international success of Fresa y chocolate and Guantanamera, and further
pursue international coproductions with commercial partners in the
attempt to ensure survival. The risk was evident, and not only nancial.
The expectations of these mainly European coproducers were inevitably
dierent from the Latin Americans with whom icaic worked during
the 1980s, and did not necessarily concur with a lmmaking tradition
predicated on engagement with national cultural values and social cri-
tique. What they sought from icaic, with some exceptions, were lms
that exploited the islands exotic image, providing local color as a back-
ground for low-budget genre movies, supported by a range of services
such as the provision of highly qualied technical sta and experienced
character actors. The fear was that directors who wanted to take advan-
tage of such a situation would have to learn to adapt their sensibilities
accordingly. One commentator quotes the opinion of Pastor Vega:
Have I changed anything in the way I conceive my work? Absolutely.
Before one thought only about the Cuban public. Now you have to
think about marketing and prots and all that. Another director,
Orlando Rojas, thought that while Cuban directors were now begin-
ning to think about commercial success, as yet there are not a lot of
mercenaries, but people were becoming more realistic and this would
give rise to another kind of lm.68
The dangers were illustrated by a couple of lms by Spanish directors
that came out in 1998. Cuarteto de la Habana (Havana quartet), directed
 Wonderland 481

by Fernando Colomo, had Cubas two best-known actresses, Mirta Ibarra

and Daisy Granados, as its stars. A comedy with a clever script and
splendid acting, especially from Mirta Ibarra as Lita, the lm presents a
touristic image of Havana, while playing on the double morality that
characterizes daily life in Havana in the 1990s. The plot is highly con-
trived. The Spanish actor Ernesto Alterio plays a young jazz musician
who lives with his grandmother in Madrid, who when she dies discov-
ers a video that purports to be a message from his mother in Havana.
Arriving in Cuba, he nds that his supposed sister is engaged to the
steward on the Spanish ight that took him there, and her mother, Lita,
is busy eecing the Spaniard in order to buy things like a new refrigera-
tor for the very large house in which they live. Needless to say, sister and
mother turn out not to be who he thought them to be. The lm tries to
be fair by poking fun at both Cubans and tourists, but in the end leaves
a bad taste. Less oensive was Mamb, directed by the Ros brothers
from a workmanlike script by Ambrosio Fornet, which tells the story of
the Cuban war of liberation against Spain in 189698 from the point of
view of a conscripted Spanish soldier who has family in Havana (and,
of course, falls in love with a Cuban woman). In Spain, the lm oended
against the orthodox version of history; elsewhere, it would be found
too orthodox a genre movie to make any ripples.
At all events, the need for hard currency became so pressing that it
strengthened the authority of icaics production oce, whose approval
now became a sine qua non, whereas previously the department had
functioned in the service of productions that were undertaken on the
basis of cultural and aesthetic criteria. Inevitably, the situation led to
considerable resentment and even suspicion of mismanagement. As the
lm critic Luciano Castilla wrote in 1999, It is a puzzle how income from
the supply of services to these coproductions is reinvested in national
cinema.69 Other eects included the departure for foreign shores of
more icaic personnel and several actors, and a generalized feeling that
Alfredo Guevara himself, icaics founder and chief ideologue, had
nally been defeated by the turn of events, and had lost the sense of con-
viction with which he had once inspired the Institute.
Ironically, in another sign of changing times, there has also been a
gradual but denite growth in acionado lmmaking, which by the end
of the 1990s would largely employ video. The cine-club movement dates
back to the end of the 1970s, and began to make an appearance at the
 482 Wonderland

lm festival in the mid-1980s, a development that lies outside the purview

of the present study. Juan Antonio Garca Borrero suggests that an eval-
uation of this other cinema might serve to explain mutations in the
communicative codes of certain ocial productions in the 1990s; per-
haps, he says, some of the elements in recent lms that people nd dis-
concerting come from the transculturation of the newest directors in
their move from acionado to professional lmmaking.70 The lms in
question include Arturo Sottos Pon tu pensamiento en m (Turn your
thoughts to me, 1995) and La ola (1995) by Enrique lvarez, whose rst
shorts were made as member of the Taller de Cine de la Asociacin
Hermanos Saz. For the most part, for example, in the work of Toms
Piard, who has also made lms with icaic and television, the approaches
cultivated by the acionado movement have been visually symbolic,
metaphorical, and aestheticist, rather than politically programmatic.
However, in 1997 one of these independent videos turned a Hi8 camera
on icaic itself. Secuencias inconclusas, directed by a young graduate of
the Instituto Superior del Arte, Amanda Chvez, and dedicated to the
memory of Toms Gutirrez Alea, begins with an extract from Memo-
rias del subdesarrollo that in the context acquires a new resonance: Here
everythings always the same . . . then suddenly it looks like a city of
cardboard . . . today everything looks dierent. Have I changed, or has
the city?
Neither the lm nor those who appear in it pull any punches. The
clips from Memorias lead into a series of commentaries by icaic direc-
tors. Orlando Rojas considers that the scandal of Alicia has left a nega-
tive mark in Cuban lm culture, a wound that has not yet been healed.
Alicias director Daniel Daz Torres admits that many people at dierent
political levels in the country continue to nd the lm uncomfortable,
but believes it remains possible to continue making a Cuban cinema, a
national cinema, belonging to the Revolution but in touch with the
complexities of reality and its contradictions. According to Pastor Vega,
however, you have to add to the economic and social problems that
make up the Special Period a certain inertia, and even apathy in the
icaic administration, which left icaic at this moment at its lowest
ever ebb, in terms of both production and risk taking, a sense of exper-
iment and search. Where every lm can become a problem, the polem-
ical is of little interest. For Juan Carlos Tabo, the main diculties are of
a nancial order, and coproductions help. Fernando Prez nds that
 Wonderland 483

the rst problem is that when youre suddenly forced to go out and
nd your own nance, it needs a mentality for which the Cuban lm-
maker is ill prepared; and the rules are unclear, as decisions about what
goes into production become more centralized, when before they were
made by the directors in their creative groups.
Garca Espinosa explains the danger of coproductions: they distort
the whole character of the lm, which now has to be shaped by com-
mercial opportunityan actor from this or that country, a story that
justies the partners participationwhich overrides aesthetic judg-
ment and cultural authenticity. The actor Luis Alberto Garca accepts
that coproductions provide material support and an opening to a mar-
ket that was previously unavailable, but cannot believe they oer a so-
lution for a genuinely Cuban cinema, which is of no interest to foreign
capital. Humberto Sols wonders why it isnt possible to use some of
the funds brought in by coproduction to support small-scale but en-
tirely local productions, but Im not an economist, I dont understand
all that. Orlando Rojas doubts that these banal subproducts bring in
much money, which is why there is little investment in national produc-
tions, but everyone wants to work on them, because they help people
make a living. In other words, people prefer to work on a French serial
or a Canadian or Italian picture, because ocially or unocially they
get a part of their salary in foreign currency. National lms are dis-
advantaged. The system is not healthy.
The situation leaves actors particularly exposed. Beatriz Valds asks
why economic chaos should have to mean that foreign producers pay
thousands of dollars for Cuban actors whose share of this income is
abysmally low, because were talking exploitation here. Adolfo Llaurado
reports that people are scandalized when he tells them he earns 340
Cuban pesos a month, the same as thirty years earlier. Thirty years ago
that was quite a lot, today its about seven dollars a month . . . but still,
Ill go on living on my seven dollars, and not do anything I dont want
to do; Id rather do something for free and not be corrupted. Jorge
Perugorra protests that icaic has no right to include the actors in
its sales package to foreign producers, French, Italian, Spanish, who
pay three million dollars to make a lm here and were included as if
were icaics property. (Three years later, some of these problems
were being resolved, at least as far as entitlement to dollar payments is
concerned.)
 484 Wonderland

The community is denuded by emigration. Luis Alberto Garca

laments how he meets up with a group of friends only to nd that half
the old bunch are no longer there; fteen has been reduced to seven,
some have left for good, others have gone on an international mission
for fteen or twenty years. It is not, he says, just economic, because a
director who leaves is not just going o to earn more money, hes going
because he wants to make a lm, like a cinematographer who hasnt
shot a lm in four or ve years will go to Ecuador or the Straits of Ma-
gellan to shoot a picture, in order to be behind a camera, because thats
his life. Among those who remain, these conditions take their toll in
destroying the sense of a community of lmmakers with a shared vision.
Fernando Prez feels he can no longer claim to represent his generation
because many of them arent making lmsor cant. There is a pol-
icy of encouraging young directors, but one of them, Arturo Soto, ad-
mits that the circumstances require concessions and it isnt his respon-
sibility as a representative of the youth that concerns him but supplying
the market. Here an undercurrent emerges that goes beyond Garca
Borreros comments on a new aesthetic among younger directors, for
this is an individualist attitude that no one in icaic has expressed be-
fore. Perrugora wants to know how icaic can let go of its heritage like
this: after so many years of sacrice and so much work by so many
people for so many years, I dont know what theyre thinking or even if
theres anyone in icaic asking these questions.
Secuencias inconclusas is a sad and shocking picture of a dispirited
group of lmmakers trying to keep hold of a dream, and it was not sur-
prisingly withheld from screening at the Havana Film Festival, restrict-
ing it to a small circulation on video. Nevertheless, it also represents a
certain deance in the face of the odds, and a determination not to go
under.

One of the paradoxes of Cuba in the 1990s was the creation of an annual
Workshop on Film Criticism (Taller Nacional de Crtica Cinematogrca)
at the very moment, in 1993, when the exercise of the profession reached
its nadir, the moment when publications disappeared due to the paper
shortageeven Cine Cubano was suspendedand a lack of new re-
leases anyway robbed the critics of their daily bread and butter. Since
then, year by year, critics from one end of the island to the other have
assembled every March in Camagey, which Garca Borrero, the mov-
 Wonderland 485

ing force behind this initiative, dubs the symbolic city, to discuss a
range of issues such as the virtues and limitations of lm criticism in
Cuba, the character of Cuban cinema in the 1990s, and in 1995, the cen-
tenary of cinema. The following years brought discussion on issues of
postmodernism, the carnivalesque, and otherness; the relationship be-
tween lmmakers and critics; between lm criticism and criticism in
the other arts; and in 1999, questions of new technologies and the hori-
zon of audience expectations. According to Garca Borrero, introducing
the eighth workshop in 2000, there have been several observable results.
The practice of lm criticism in Cuba has acquired greater cohesion;
this includes the reconguration of the national critical map through
recognition of the role of lm critics working in the provinces. At the
same time, contacts have been improved between national and interna-
tional critics and institutions, and between Cuban critics and lmmak-
ers. Further, the analytical arsenal of the lm critic has expanded, and
links have been forged between lm criticism and that of other arts.
The event has also helped to stimulate the promotion of lm culture at
the very moment it came under threat because of the contraction of
activity. Garca Borrero cites the examples of lm events in other provin-
cial cities including Ciego de vila, Las Turnas, Santa Clara, and Cien-
fuegos, while in Camagey itself (the countrys third-largest city) the
screenings accompanying the Workshop now attracted an audience of
some sixty thousand.71
He also mentions that the Workshop has served to preserve the criti-
cal memory of the period by publishing its proceedings at a moment
when it seemed that criticism had become an oral activity, but there is a
rider to this. The critics at the Round Table at the eighth workshop in
2000 did not all agree that the conditions for the practice of their craft
had entirely improved, but several of them noted an increase in the
number and variety of texts published since the middle of the decade,
when the publishing industry began to recover. What seems to have
happened is that lm criticism has moved from the newspapers to the
journals, and at the same time changed its orientation, since, as one of
them points out, the daily or weekly column that reviews new lms be-
comes a fairly pointless activity when irregularities in publication pro-
duce a gap between the release of a new lm and the publication of the
review, and anyway the number of new releases is minimal.72 If this new
criticism ironically appeared just as the islands lm culture entered
 486 Wonderland

into crisis, then through its tenor and terms of reference it also stakes
out a place in the wider transformation going on in the political culture
in the same period. It is more analytical, its discourse is less tied to me-
chanical models of Marxism and more cognizant of the theories of
postmodernism in the West; above all, it operates with a knowledge of
cinema that is up to date and impressively wide-ranging. This indicates
not only the ecacy of video in breaking through the blockade, but
also a shift in outlook, in which Cuban cinema is increasingly seen within
a global perspective that places Latin American lms alongside the lat-
est from Hollywood, China, Iran, or England without privileging any of
them. This a world in which the old idea of the New Latin American
Cinema has been superseded by a new reality, which in Cuba takes on a
double signicance, for, in passing through the crisis of the 1990s to
survive without any strings attaching it to a foreign power, Cuba has
entered a new global space in which the authenticity of national cul-
tures is everywhere both asserted and called into question.
In certain respects, however, the new criticism is not entirely new.
One of the rst examples is an article already cited in these pages, No
Adult Cinema without Systematic Heresy, by Rufo Caballero and Joel
del Ro, which appeared in the journal Temas in 1995. The signicance
of the piece is not that what it says has never been uttered before, but
rather that such opinions are here appearing for the rst time in print.
Temas, a publication nanced by the ministry of culture, was estab-
lished precisely in order to provide a forum for critical debate across a
wide range of subjects around the social sciences, and, together with La
Gaceta de Cuba, published by uneac, has played a crucial role in the
gestation of the new lm criticism. The critic is now daring to write
what many have been thinking and feeling already for some time, at the
same time developing ideas in new directions. What has happened is
that the boundaries between dierent types of speech, dating back to
the 1970s, are being redrawn, and what could not be said directly in
public discourse but circulated in public through interpersonal speech
is now beginning to appear in print, albeit in small-circulation publica-
tions. This is not say that the ocial discourse has been taken over by
new thinking, but rather that it has lost its exclusive hold over the spaces
of public debate, where discussion has become more porous.
The foreign observer, like the writer of these lines, who returns to
Cuba in the late 1990s, also discovers that conversation is no longer
 Wonderland 487

hemmed in by tacit understanding about what can and cannot be said.

On the contrary, interlocutors who would once have guarded their words,
not wishing to be overheard by the wrong person, or sometimes simply
not to hear themselves say such things, now speak freely what is on their
minds. As Rafael Hernndez puts it, what was previously perceived as a
deviation from the norm, inconsistent with prevailing values, and sus-
pect as being bourgeois in origin, is no longer automatically rejected as
oensive to good habits, and has even become paradigmatic for certain
groups.73 While Hernndez is speaking here of economic activity, like
living o a dollar income and indulging in consumerist behavior, that
the same is true of the world of ideas is demonstrated by the very article
where the comment is made, which appeared in the journal Nueva
Sociedad in 1998. A commentary of a kind that it would have been di-
cult to publish a few years previously, this article also serves, as the work
of a party intellectual, to indicate a certain space of polemic that has
opened up within the party itself, which perhaps represents a new po-
litical realism. But political reality in Cuba remains paradoxical and one
must be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. Hernndez, for
example, believes it dicult to assess the real extent of this eroded con-
sensus because of its very characteristics, which occlude the extent of its
penetration into the deepest structures of social psychology. But in po-
litical terms, he says, there is little sign either of the consensus breaking
up or of the emergence of a public consciousness favorable to the col-
lapse of the established order.74 Foreign observers nd this puzzling to
the extent that they assume Cuba must be undergoing a transition of
the same kind as occurred in Eastern Europe, to liberal democracy, and
they attribute the lack of progress to continuing political control. They
do not consider the possibility that the lack of public desire for the col-
lapse of the established order is a positive choice, the legitimate senti-
ment of a majority that does not wish to see the even greater damage to
their lives that such a disruption would bring: a form of existential
patience in the face of acute frustration.
The new criticism is certainly informed by a sense of political real-
ism. At the dawn of the new century, one of the most striking examples
is an essay by Dsire Daz published in La Gaceta de Cuba in 2000,
The Ulysses Syndrome: The Journey in Cuban Cinema in the 90s.
Here, in examining the gure of the journey to be found in several
dierent guises in a number of Cuban lms of the preceeding decade,
 488 Wonderland

Daz places these lms and their symbolism in the context of recent
critical thinking on migration and diaspora, identity and displacement,
and the imagined communities of nationhood. Cuba, which has suered
intensely from the eects of migration, now nds itself in a world of
global displacements of populations and the formation of new diasporas,
especially in the hegemonic countries of the North, which destabilize
the concepts of identity, tradition, and cultural belonging. These ques-
tions take on a particular cast in Cuba, a country that has been split into
fractured moieties by successive waves of emigration over the preceding
four decades, each of which claims a monopoly on patriotism. Depart-
ing Cuba, says Daz, has long been seen as a dramatic act associated
with feelings of rupture, repudiation, and loss that leave their mark on
every levelthe individual, the family, the island, the nationbut that
are all too frequently suppressed by the drastic postures of ocial dis-
course in both the emigrant and immigrant countries. Again, this essay
and its subject are part of a the same ideological alteration. In Cuba,
simply to speak of the nation as an imagined community already marks
a signal shift in critical discourse, and if the stereotype of the counter-
revolutionary gusano massed in Miami is weakened through the intro-
duction of the term diaspora, the lms of the 1990s similarly show a
marked tendency to rethink the metaphorical, existential, and even onto-
logical character of Cubas isolation and insularity.
Dzs thesis is that Cuban cinema in the 1990s sought to question the
traditional view that stigmatized the migr, and to develop a more
subtle and exible attitude toward the issue in place of dogmatism and
belligerence. The phenomenon of migration comes to be inscribed in
these lms in a number of formsas departure, return, internal exile,
or nostalgia. The journey, real or metaphorical, is represented fundamen-
tally in two ways: as a circumstance that creates a rupture and a loss
often magniedor, more conceptually, as the transition between two
moments. It is also the sign of a process of search.75 If very few lms
before the 1990s confronted the disjuncture caused by emigration
Lejana by Jess Daz is the obvious exception, and it was largely ignored
or belittled by the criticsDsire Daz sees the theme as a recurring
preoccupation of the last decade of the century. Indeed, it is already
present in three lms from the early 1990s that she doesnt mention,
Mujer transparente, Fresa y chocolate, and Reina y Rey. It then comes up
in a pair of lms by Fernando Prez, Madagascar (1994) and La vida es
 Wonderland 489

silbar (1998), two lms by new directors, La ola by Enrique lvarez (1995)
and Amor vertical by Arturo Sotto (1997), and again, more allegorically,
in Lista de espera by Juan Carlos Tabo (2000).
La ola centers on a pair of young lovers enduring the summer of
1994, searching out isolated corners of the city in order to make love,
whose only real dierence is that she wishes to leave and he prefers to
stay. In every other respect, says Daz, the two of them are interchange-
able, mutually complementary representatives of a generation shorn of
ideological preoccupations that is condemned to a waiting game. The
lm represents, she says, an ontological search that coincides . . . with
the localization of real spaces attuned to personal realization in which
the sea and the waves present a dening question: for one of them to
cross the waters would constitute a denitive separation, a loss for both
of them. It all sounds rather rareed, and it is, with the consequence
that the most impressive thing about the lm is the cinematography of
Santiago Yanez, which presents a vision of Havana far from the typical
colorful crowded city of popular imagination, but full of longing, or
what might be called nostalgia for an unknown future.
Sotto, like lvarez, again poses the problem of emigration in terms of
the existential dilemma of departure and the rupture it necessarily
implies, although they dier in both their treatment of the theme and
their aesthetics. Amor vertical was Sottos second feature. A graduate of
the lm school of San Antonio de los Baos, he won a rst prize at the
Havana Film Festival in 1992 for a ctional short, Talco para lo negro
(Talcum for the black man), and quickly went on to make his rst fea-
ture. Pon tu pensamiento en m is an unlikely religious allegory about a
troupe of itinerant players in an unidentied Latin American country
in an unspecied time, one of whom appears to perform miracles on
the stage, though he only has two tricks up his sleeve, one with bread
and one with sh. Full of intertextual allusions to other lms on the
same allegory such as Jesus of Montreal, and ocially promoted as an
extraordinary debut, it proved a damp squib. Sotto has defended the
lack of temporal and geographical specicity as the product of the exi-
gencies of production in Cuba in a particularly problematic moment,76
but the lm was too abstract and too obvious at the same time: the
people believe the actor is the new savior, he denies it, but the people
need something to believe inso what? Amor vertical, which followed
two years later, is not much more convincing, but rather funnier. A surreal
 490 Wonderland

sociocritical comedy about frustrated love, which this time pays explicit
homage to Buuel and Fellini, it takes its title from a comic sequence in
which a couple take advantage of a power cut to make love in an eleva-
tor. Daz, however, cites an unforgettable scene that portrays a dierent
kind of conjoining, that of a pair of Siamese twins who need an opera-
tion to separate them that is only available in the United States, but
they have opposing political views and cannot agree to go. When one
says, Ive told you that living in the island is a very expensive dignity,
the other replies, You dont realize that Miami is a cardboard city. The
symbolic pair literally embody a metaphor of the nation, the girls forcibly
united by natural conditions, wanting to separate and follow dierent
paths, who represent the polarization suered by everyone faced with
the disjuncture of departure: they are two, yet they are one, and express
the duality by which Cuba is now constituted. To have the operation in
Havana, it is likely one of them will diewhich will it be? Here the
twins become a sign of the death that follows separation: not physical
death, as may occur in the lm, but emotional, cultural, and moral (the
nation may die when it separates, when one part goes and the other re-
mains, or what amounts to the same, when one part stays put without
its other half).77
In Madagascar the journey is imaginary and internaland condensed
into fty minutes of cinematic poetry. Evoking the model of one of the
nest of all Cuban lms, Luca of 1968, in which Humberto Sols told
the stories of three women at three dierent historical moments, Prez
paints a wistful portrait of three generations of women living under the
same roof in contemporary Cuba. Laura (Zaida Castellanos), a physics
lecturer, twice divorced, tells her doctor that she has problems dream-
ing: she dreams what she lives, the same thing twenty-four hours a day,
and she would like to dream something else; Laurita (Laura de la Uz),
her daughter, daydreams of going to Madagascar, quits school, and
discovers religion; her boyfriend, a silent and irreverent painter, plays
Monopoly with her grandmother (Elena Bolaos), who delights in put-
ting the little red hotels on her property.
Originally intended as one of a trilogy of short dramas, Prez returns
to the same territory as his previous lm, Hello Hemingway, but this
time turns out a narrative experiment that seems intent on upsetting
stereotypes, whether those of a girls coming-of-age story, or the alle-
gory of the nation as woman. In this purportedly ordinary Cuban family,
 Wonderland 491

Amor vertical (Arturo Sotto, 1997)

where it happens that men are marginal or wholly absent, the grand-
mother, as Anne Marie Stock points out, is not a repository of tradi-
tional wisdom. At the beginning of the lm, Laurita is rebellious and
consumed by the angst of growing up, reads the poetry of Rimbaud,
and turns to religion. By the end, she has become the model daughter,
returns to school, passes her exams, talks to people. But at the same
time, she swaps positions with her mother, who nds it increasingly
dicult to keep up her engagement with an inert reality in which she
can no longer discover her past. When Laura gets out an old newspaper
clipping with a photograph of a political rally, which she inspects with a
magnifying glass, the close-up image becomes an undierentiated mass
of dots as she asks herself out loud, Where am I, Dios mo, where am
I? What remains of the young woman in that public square in the
1960s, observes Stock, are memories inextricable from her yearnings
of today and her hopes for the future.78 The mother ends up asking the
daughter, Do you have your bags packed? Were going to Madagascar.
Why Madagascar? Because, of course, it is like a mirror image of Cuba,
a poor island separated from a nearby continent, somewhere practically
impossible to get to. But Madagascar, as Stock puts it, is more a state of
mind than a place, internal rather than external, intangible . . . emotional
and spiritual (27). It is not an accident that Laurita reads Rimbaud and
 492 Wonderland

conceives an imaginary journey as a means of escape. She looks out to-

ward the sea and says, Im going to Madagascar. Its not stupid, its
what I dont know. In another scene, she stands on one of Havanas at
roofs, chanting Madagascar, Madagascar, Madagascar, arms out-
stretched, body forming a cross, or perhaps an embrace, or as if she
were about to launch herself in ight over the city. Here (and else-
where) the lm departs from representational realism as the camera
moves back to reveal similar gures on similar roofs, T-shaped forms
interrupting the uniform urban skyline, like a series of antennae receiv-
ing and transmitting, a blend of multiple voices all chanting in unison.
From the beginning, the lm presents a series of images that evoke
states of transition or movement toward an unknown or unreal desti-
nation. In the opening sequence, which is unlike anything previously
seen in Cuban cinema, a series of shots of torsos in movement are re-
vealed as a sea of cyclists on their way to work in a haunting shadowy
blue dawn. What we see here, says Stock, is not people reaching their
destination but only their eort to keep moving. During the lm, the
family moves, riding on a truck loaded with furniture and chattels
through the city. Piled boxes, crated furniture, squeaking pulleys, and
empty rooms underline their state of migrancy (25). At the end, mother
and daughter are left pushing their bikes through a tunnel; the picture
cuts to a train clacking along the tracks past dilapidated buildings in a
stark industrial landscape, while the sound track has the legendary
Omara Portuondo singing about the impossibility of living separately.
The old-style love song becomes an existential lament. Frustration, lack
of communication between the generations, silence about the degener-
ation of the Revolution, Havana here is a city of disillusion, disappoint-
ment, discouragement, bathed in a strange, timeless beauty, and of
meditation on the entanglement of the lost promises of youth and revo-
lutionary hopes.
The urge for the outside that nourishes Laurita is what Elpidio in La
vida es silbar resists, in another lm that serves as a barometer of the
thwarted aspirations of present-day Cuban life. A much more elaborate
and symbolically coded lm, again beautifully shot by Ral Prez Ureta,
this is a touching and slyly critical social comedy with absurdist elements
and surreal imagery, like the mysterious gure of Bebe, a face that always
appears underwater, who narrates the lm and sometimes intervenes to
alter the detailsis she telling or inventing it? Bebe is the link between
 Wonderland 493

Madagascar (Fernando Prez, 1994)

the parallel stories of three characters who never meet but share a com-
mon yearning for an elusive happiness. Mariana is a ballerina about to
dance her rst Giselle (a role identied in Cuba with the legendary Alicia
Alonso); in her desperate anxiety to succeed, she promises God to give
up sex. Julia, who works in an old peoples home, suers from a strange
illness, which her psychiatrist explains is not unusual, in fact many
Habaneros suer from itthey collapse in a faint on hearing certain
words pronounced in their hearing. In her case the word is sex, but his
diagnosis is hilariously demonstrated as she ees from the hospital in
disbelief, and, chasing after her, people around them fall to the ground
as he calls out words like free, double morality, opportunism, and fear of
the truth. Elpidio, surname Valds, who calls his mother Cuba, is a
would-be musician who lives o his wits. A composite gure with the
same name as the hero of Cubas popular cartoon series, a nineteenth-
century freedom ghter for the islands independence, he is also the
symbolic son of Santa Brbara and the Afro-Cuban deity Shang; virile
and strong, he worships a Santa Brbara he keeps at home. The outside
world is represented by Chrissy, the foreigner arriving in Cuba on a
 494 Wonderland

research mission, literally descending from the skies in a balloon, who

becomes Elpidios lover. Chrissy, according to the director, represents
another way of thinking and seeing life, but cannot tempt Elpidio to
go with her when she leaves.79 As they oat over the city in Chrissys
balloon, she oers to take him o to her own world, to discover other
sensations, other feelings. This is freedom! she says. Do you know
freedom? and Elpidio answers, I dont know, I feel dizzy. Here the
journey is seen as a need to ee from precarious circumstances while
emotional attachments prevent it. As the bicycle-taxi driver puts it, pon-
dering a snail, Snails are almost perfect, because theyre the only ones
who can live abroad without feeling nostalgia for home. Elpidio rejects
the temptation to escape because of the atavistic inuence of the earth
mother, the love of a country that transcends the political patriotism
that is owed to the state, but his desire will not be quelled by compli-
ance. He ends up addressing his island mother, Im not going to change
now, but I cant live without you either. If you want to accept me as I
am, let my music take me to you. It is possible to critique this lm
though without disparaging its poeticsas itself an attempt to escape
reality, to soften the anxieties and disillusion of the unending Special
Period with a symbolic fantasy about spirituality, and this indeed is in
part what the Cuban audience felt about it. The most ambiguous of its
symbols is the promise that is made in the lm of a happier future in
the year 2020, which is, at one and the same time, less than a lifetime
hence but impossibly far into the future.
In Tabos Lista de espera (Waiting list) of 2000, the journey is again
forbidden and impossible, because there are no buses to allow them to
get away. Daz oers a striking interpretation that sees the lm as the
inverse of Alicia. In Alicia a young drama teacher is sent to a town lost
in the middle of the country that embodies the worst of real socialism.
She struggles to change their demented ways but meets with incompre-
hension, and nally has to make her escape. In Lista de espera a group of
people are stuck in a bus station at the edge of a town that could also be
called Maravillas, yet faced with the impossibility of achieving their ob-
jective, they band together and spend their time doing the bus station
up, painting it, installing a library, cooking a collective meal of celebra-
tion. Next morning they wake up to realize theyve been caught up in a
collective dream. As Diz sees it, in Alicia the protagonist wants at rst
to remain and take on the whole world, then decides she has to leave. In
 Wonderland 495

Lista de espera the characters start by wanting to leave but end up not
wanting to abandon the place they have constructed together. But this is
progress: In Alicia, at the beginning of the decade, there are no solu-
tions available and anxiety for change is nothing more than a fanciful
idea, while Lista de espera reverses this ending, and the compulsion to
go somewhere else is no longer so urgent.80
Lead actor Vladimir Cruz calls the lm a sort of metaphor on the
construction of paradise or utopia, which is rather like the history of
Cuba over the last few years.81 His character is an engineer who loves
his profession but earns a miserable salary that hardly amounts to a liv-
ing. His only remedy is to give up his job and join his family in Oriente
breeding pigs in order to make some money. In the bus station, he meets
a young professional woman, but she is going to Havana to marry a
Spaniard. This love story satises the conventional demands of the genre,
but the thrust of the lm is the fragility of the utopian dream.
In ne, Lista de espera is a lm in the mold of a Buuelesque comedy
in the style of Alea that could perhaps have been made at any time in
the last twenty years, but it is also a lm that leaves a critical question
hanging in the air. As Cruz puts it, We Cubans have turned postpone-
ment into an art; we are the inventors of the art of knowing how to
wait. What we have constructed, rather than the dream, is the waiting
room to the dream. And this, indeed, is the very question that faces
Cuba at the dawn of the new centurythe imperative to make sense of
the waiting room to a dream.
This page intentionally left blank
 Notes

Preface

1. Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de ccin (1910/
1998) (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2001).

Introduction

1. The present account is based on the printed version of the original speech
and conversations in Havana in December 1998.
2. Manuel Vsquez Montalbn, Y Dios entr en La Habana (Madrid: El Pas/
guilar, 1998), 684.
3. The interview was published later in the year. See Alfredo Guevara, Revolu-
cin es lucidez (Havana: Ediciones icaic, 1998), 53.
4. Conversation in Havana, December 1998.
5. Vsquez Montalbn, Y Dios entr en La Habana, 353.
6. Fidel Castro, Words to the Intellectuals, in Lee Baxandall, ed., Radical Per-
spectives in the Arts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 276.
7. Quoted in Vsquez Montalbn, Y Dios entr en La Habana, 331.
8. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea.
9. Quoted in David Craven, The Visual Arts since the Cuban Revolution,
Third Text 20 (1992): 9192.
10. John Hess, No ms Habermas, Screen 40:2 (1999): 2037. See also http://
www.igc.org/jhess/cuba-screen.html.
11. Oscar Quiros, Critical Mass of Cuban Cinema: Art as the Vanguard of Soci-
ety, Screen 37:3 (1996): 27993; Catherine Davies, Modernity, Masculinity and Im-
perfect Cinema in Cuba, Screen 38:4 (winter 1997): 34559.
12. Davies, Modernity, Masculinity, 358; and see Julia Lesage, One Way or An-
other: Dialectical, Revolutionary, Feminist, Jump Cut 20 (May 1979): 2023.
13. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Rout-
ledge, 1983), 190; and Julio Garca Espinosa, For an Imperfect Cinema, in Michael

497
 498 Notes to Chapter 2

Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: British
Film Institute/Channel 4, 1983).
14. Quiros, Critical Mass of Cuban Cinema. 286, 289.
15. See entry for Amada in Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine
cubano de ccin (1910/1998) (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2001).
16. Fredric Jameson, Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capi-
talism, Social Text 15 (fall 1986).
17. Hess, No ms Habermas.
18. See Quiros, Critical Mass of Cuban Cinema. On Julio Garca Espinosas Por
un cine imperfecto, see chapter 13.
19. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Paperback, 1969), 242.
20. The only exception I would make is a series of three lms by an English lm-
maker, the late Marc Karlin.
21. See Rafael Hernndez, Mirar a Cuba: Ensayos sobre cultura y sociedad civil
(Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1999), 12829.
22. Conversation in Havana, December 1998.

1. For the First Time

1. Throughout the book, quotations from lms have been made either from
dialogue scripts provided by icaic or, as in this case, by direct transcription from
the lm on a viewing machine. Some of the dialogue scripts were supplied in En-
glish translation; otherwise all translations are my own. This also applies to all
foreign-language texts unless an English translation is cited.
2. Maksim Gorki, You Dont Believe Your Eyes, World Film News (March 1938).
3. Antonio Ban, Filosofa del arte (Havana: Ediciones icaic, 1967), 72.
4. Figures compiled from the Anuario Cinematogrco y Radial Cubano, the
prerevolutionary lm trade annual; Francisco Mota, 12 aspectos econmicos de la
cinematografa cubana, Lunes de Revolucin, February 6, 1961; Armando Hart, Del
trabajo cultural (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978), 338.
5. Nstor Garca Canclini, Arte popular y sociedad en Amrica Latina (Mexico
City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1977), 24748; 16 mm exhibition gures supplied by icaic,
1983.
6. Mayra Vilasis, interview with Octavio Cortzar, El documental, Cortzar, El
brigadista, Cine Cubano 93: 76.
7. Fernando Birri in New Cinema of Latin America, ICinema of the Humble,
dir. Michael Chanan, 1983. See also Fernando Birri, Cinema y subdesarrollo, Cine
Cubano 4244: 13.
8. Interview with Ruy Guerra, El cine brasileo y la experiencia del Cinema
Nuovo, Octubre (Mexico) 23 (January 1975): 46.

2. Back to the Beginning

1. Philip S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American

Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 1:16768.
 Notes to Chapter 3 499

2. H. Wayne Morgan, Americas Road to Empire: The War with Spain and Over-
seas Expansion (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 13.
3. Albert E. Smith, Two Reels and a Crank (New York: Doubleday, 1952), 55. Sub-
sequent references are given in the text.
4. Sara Calvo and Alejandro Armangol, El racismo en el cine, Serie Literatura y
Arte (Havana: Departamento de Actividades Culturales Universidad de la Habana,
1978), 27 n. 16.
5. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977),
5455.
6. For details in this paragraph and what follows, see Aurelio de los Reyes, Los
orgenes del cine en Mxico (18961900) (Mexico City: UNAM Cuadernos de Cine,
1973), 178; Arturo Agramonte, Cronologa del cine cubano (Havana: Ediciones icaic,
1966); articles in the Anuario Cinematogrco y Radial Cubano; and Rolando Daz
Rodrguez and Lzaro Buria Prez, Un caso de colonizacin cinematogrca, Caimn
Barbudo 85 (December 1975).
7. Quoted in Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War, 2:562.
8. Ibid., 669.
9. J. M. Valds Rodrguez, Algo en torno al cine y la Repblica Cubana, Part II,
El Mundo, April 19, 1960.
10. Sontag, On Photography, 64.

3. The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

1. Francisco Lpez Segrera, La economa y la poltica en la repblica neocolo-

nial (19021933), in La repblica neocolonial, Anuario de estudios cubanos 1 (Ha-
vana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), 13032.
2. Jos Carlos Maritegui, Siete ensayos de interpretacin de la realidad peruana,
(Havana: Casa de las Amricas, 1975), 21.
3. Quoted in Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin
America (London: Penguin, 1971), 115.
4. Ambrosio Fornet, Literatura y mercado en la Cuba colonial (183060), Casa
de las Amricas 84: 48.
5. Alejo Carpentier, La msica en Cuba (1946), 90. On nineteenth-century mu-
sical culture in Europe, see William Weber, Music and the Middle Classes, (Croom
Helm, 1975).
6. Quoted in Gordon Brotherstone, Latin American Poetry (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1975), 56.
7. Quoted in Franoise Perus, Literatura y sociedad en America Latina: el mo-
dernismo (Havana: Casa de las Amricas 1976), 99.
8. Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America (London: Penguin, 1970), 31.
9. Cited in Arturo Agramonte, Cronologa del cine cubano (Havana: Ediciones
icaic, 1966), 32.
10. J. M. Valds Rodrguez, Algo en torno al cine y la Repblica Cubana, Part
III, El Mundo, April 21, 1960.
11. Ibid., 33.
 500 Notes to Chapter 4

4. Melodrama and White Horses

1. Rolando Daz Rodrguez and Lzaro Buria Prez, Un caso de colonizacin

cinematogrca, Caimn Barbudo 85 (December 1975): 67.
2. See Francisco Mota, 12 aspectos econmicos de la cinematografa cubana,
Lunes de Revolucin, February 6, 1961.
3. Jos Agustn Mahieu, Breve historia del cine argentino (Buenos Aires: Edito-
rial Universitaria, 1966), 5.
4. Pierre Bachlin, Histoire conomique du cinma (Paris: La Nouvelle dition,
1947), 21.
5. William Martson Seabury, The Public and the Motion Picture Industry (New
York: Macmillan, 1926), 39.
6. Bachlin, Histoire conomique du cinma, 127.
7. Report on Market for Cinematograph Films in Cuba (furnished by His Majestys
Consul-General in Havana, March 13, 1923), typewritten copy, Library of the British
Film Institute.
8. Seabury, The Public and the Motion Picture Industry, 283.
9. Quoted in Arturo Agramonte, Cronologa dol cine cubano (Havana: Ediciones
icaic, 1966), 42.
10. Distributing the Product in J. P. Kennedy, ed., The Story of the Film (Lon-
don: A. W. Shaw & Co., 1927), 22526.
11. Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1969), 78.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. World Trade in Commodities, November 1947, Motion Pictures and Equip-
ment (report by Byron White, U.S. embassy, Havana), 3.
14. E. Bradford Burns, Introduction, in Beatriz Reyes Nevares, The Mexican Cin-
ema: Interviews with Thirteen Directors (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1976), xii.
15. Eduardo Colina and Daniel Daz Torres, Ideologa del melodrama en el
viejo cine latinoamericano, Cine Cubano 7375: 15.
16. Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Ediciones
Era, 1968), 48.
17. Colina and Daz Torres, Ideologa del melodrama en el viejo cine latinoamer-
icano.
18. See Emilio Garca Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano, vol. 1 (Mex-
ico City: Ediciones Era, 1969).
19. Agramonte, Cronologa del cine cubano, 65.
20. Raimond del Castillo, Cuban Cinema, Sight and Sound (September 1947).
21. Emilio Garca Riera, El cine mexicano (Mexico City: 1963), Ediciones Era, 28.
22. Quoted by Colina and Daz Torres, Ideologa del melodrama en el viejo cine
latinoamericano, 15 n. 12.
23. Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano, 156.
24. Garca Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano, 51.
25. J. M. Valds Rodrguez, Algo en torno al cine y la Repblica Cubana, Part
III, El Mundo, April 21, 1960.
26. Cuban to Back Film Production Setup, Variety, February 11, 1953.
 Notes to Chapter 5 501

27. scar Pino Santos, Las posibilidades de una industria cinematogrca en

Cuba: Consideraciones, Carteles, November 30, 1958.
28. Francisco Mota, 12 aspectos econmicos de la cinematogra cubana, Lunes
de Revolucin, February 6, 1961.
29. Cuba Tax in New Vexation, Variety, January 27, 1954.

5. Amateurs and Militants

1. Nstor Almendros, The Cinema in Cuba, Film Culture 2:3 (1956).

2. Nstor Almendros, Das de una cmara (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982), 44.
(English: The Man with a Camera [London: Faber and Faber, 1985].)
3. Alfredo Guevara, Una nueva etapa del cine en Cuba, Cine Cubano 3.
4. Postwar Market Potentialities for Motion Picture Equipment in Cuba, by
Nathan D. Golden, Motion Picture Unit Chief, Industrial Reference Service, vol. 3,
Part III, no. 7 (August 1945).
5. See Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State: The Secret History of ITT (Lon-
don: Coronet, 1974).
6. See Rolando Daz Rodrguez and Lzaro Buria Prez, Un caso de colo-
nizacin cinematogrca, Caimn Barbudo 87 (February 1975).
7. Figures extrapolated from Warren Dygart, Radio as an Advertising Medium
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 23133.
8. Alejo Carpentier, La msica en Cuba (1946), 1.
9. See Rachael Low, Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930s (The History
of the British Film 19291939) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979), 12830.
10. Miguel Torres, Respuesta, Cine Cubano 5455: 19.
11. Motion Pictures and Equipment, World Trade in Commodities (November
1947): 4.
12. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, January 1980.
13. For this and the next citation, see the appropriate entries in Georges Sadoul,
Dictionary of Films, trans. and ed. P. Morris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1972).
14. Julio Antonio Mella, Octubre, Tren Blindado (Mexico, 1928), reprinted in
Cine Cubano 5455: 11112.
15. J. M. Valds Rodrguez, Hollywood: Sales Agent of American Imperialism,
Experimental Cinema 4.
16. See Max Henrquez Urea, Panorama histrico de la literatura cubana, vol. 2
(Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1979), 421.
17. Cf. Robin Blackburn, Class Forces in the Cuban Revolution: A Reply to Pe-
ter Binns and Mike Gonzalez, International Socialism, series 2, no. 9.
18. Quoted in Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), 134.
19. See Zoila Gmez, Amadeo Roldn (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1977), 63.
20. Arturo Agramonte, Cronologa del cine cubano (Havana: Ediciones icaic,
1966), 156.
21. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, January 1981.
22. See Valds Rodrguez, Hollywood.
 502 Notes to Chapter 6

23. Conversation with Alfredo Guevara, Havana, September 1979.

24. Agramonte, Cronologa del cine cubano, 8081, 8687.
25. See Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valds, Revolutionary Struggle 1947
1958: Selected Works of Fidel Castro, vol. 1 (Cambridge: mit Press, 1972), 2425.
26. Agramonte, Cronologa del cine cubano, 159.
27. Jos Antonio Gronzlez, Apuntes para la historia de un cine sin historia,
Cine Cubano 8688.
28. Harold Gramatges, La msica en defensa del hombre, Revolucin y Cultura
5254 (197677).
29. Jos Antonio Portuondo, Itinerario esttico de la Revolucin Cubana (Havana:
Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1979).
30. Agramonte, 16062.
31. Conversation with Manuel Prez, Havana, January 1980.
32. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Havana, January 1981.
33. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Havana, January 1980.
34. Fulgencio Batista, Piedras y Leyes (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1961), 73, 80.
35. Lionel Martin, The Early Fidel: The Roots of Castros Communism (Secaucus,
N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1978), 227.
36. See Bonachea and Valds, Revolutionary Struggle 19471958, Introduction.
37. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Signet, 1966), 24.
38. Quoted in Herbert Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1.
39. See Bonachea and Valds, Revolutionary Struggle 19471958, 109.
40. Che Guevara to Nuestro Tiempo, January 27, 1959, in uvres rvolutionnaires
19591967 (Paris: Maspero, 1968), 25.

6. The Coming of Socialism

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, On Cuba, (London: Ballantine Books, 1961), 62.

2. Sergio Carbo, El segundo movimiento, Anuario Cinematogrco y Radial
Cubano, 1959.
3. Editorial, Anuario Cinematogrco y Radial Cubano, 1959.
4. Edward Boorstein, The Economic Transformation of Cuba (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1969), 53.
5. Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1968), 8586.
6. Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Pocket Books, 1962), 379.
7. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Havana, January 1980.
8. Cine Cubano 95: 13.
9. Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 9, 10.
10. Conversation with Alfredo Guevara, Havana, January 1980.
11. Ambrosio Fornet, El intelectual y la sociedad, Coleccin Mnima No. 28 (Mex-
ico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1969), 49.
12. See Tariq Ali in Carl Gardner, ed., Media, Politics and Culture (London:
Macmillan, 1979), 152.
13. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Havana, January 1980. (During
 Notes to Chapter 7 503

research for this book, I sought to obtain an interview with Guillermo Cabrera
Infante, who lives in London, but received no response.)
14. Alfredo Guevara, Revisando nuestro trabajo, Cine Cubano 2: 12.
15. Sartre, On Cuba, 142.
16. Ibid., 152.
17. Ibid., 149.
18. Fornet, El intelectual y la sociedad, 48.
19. Tad Szulc and Karl E. Mayer, in Boorstein, The Economic Transformation of
Cuba, 29.
20. Financial Times, May 13, 1961; Times, January 6, 1965.
21. Conversation with Enrique Pineda Barnet, Havana, January 1980.
22. Nstor Almendros, Das de un cmara (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982), 47.
23. Ugo Ulive, Crnica del cine cubano, Cine al da 12 (March 1971): 9.
24. Guevara, Revisando nuestro trabajo, 14.
25. Boorstein, The Economic Transformation of Cuba, 8184.
26. This and subsequent quotations by Alfredo Guevara are from a conversation
in Havana, January 1980.
27. See Robin Blackburn, Class Forces in the Cuban Revolution: A Reply to Pe-
ter Binns and Mike Gonzalez, International Socialism, series 2, no. 9.
28. Nicholas Wollaston, Red Rumba, Readers Union edition (1964).
29. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Notes from the Bearded Crocodile, London Re-
view of Books, June 417, 1981.
30. Pedro Prez Sarduy, An Infant in English Breeches: What Really Happened
in Cuba, Red Letters 15 (1983): 25.
31. Serge Daney, Sur Salador in Travail, lecture, jouissance, Cahiers du
Cinma 222.
32. Alfredo Guevara, Una nueva etapa del cine en Cuba, Cine Cubano 3.
33. Michle Firk, Naissance dun cinma, Positif 53 (June 1963): 15.
34. Fidel Castro, Words to the Intellectuals, in Lee Baxandall, ed., Radical Per-
spectives in the Arts (London: Penguin, 1972).
35. Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel, 13034.
36. In Fornet, El intelectual y la sociedad, 92.
37. Ibid.
38. Julio Garca Espinosa, Respuesta, Cine Cubano 5455: 1112.

7. The First Feature Films

1. Eduardo Heras Len, Historias de la revolucin y el joven rebelde, Pen-

samiento Crtico 42 (July 1970): 12834; reprinted in Cine y Revolucin en Cuba
(Barcelona: Editorial Fontamara, 1975).
2. Resultados de una discusin crtica, Cine al da 12 (March 1971).
3. See Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom (Harmondsworth: Penguin Ed-
ucation, 1972).
4. Julianne Burton, Individual Fulllment and Collective Achievement, an In-
terview with T. G. Alea, Cineaste 8:1 (1977).
5. Ibid.
 504 Notes to Chapter 9

8. Beyond Neorealism
1. Alfredo Guevara, Realidades y perspectivas de un nuevo cine, Cine Cubano 1.
2. Conversation with Sergio Giral, Havana, January 1980.
3. Conversation with Humberto Sols, Havana, January 1980.
4. Toms Gutirrez Alea, 12 notas para Las 12 Sillas, Cine Cubano 6 (1962):
1519.
5. Conversation with Alfredo Guevara, Havana, September 1979; see also re-
marks by Julio Garca Espinosa in Augusto M. Torres and Manuel Prez Estremera,
Breve historia del cine cubano, Hablemos de cine (Peru) 69, reprinted in the same
authors Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, n.d.).
6. Julio Garca Espinosa, Cine Cubano 5455: 12.
7. Quoted in Ugo Ulive, Crnica del cine cubano, Cine al da 12 (March 1971).
8. Nstor Garca Canclini, Arte popular y sociedad en Amrica Latin (Mexico
City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1977), 196.
9. Ernesto Cardenal, En Cuba. (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1977), 164.
10. Interview with Claude Julien, Le Monde, March 22, 1963.
11. K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans.
Arnold Pomerans (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 241. Karol, a left-wing critic of
the Cuban Revolution, was heavily criticized by the Cubans when his book was rst
published in France. As far as its discussion of cultural aairs is concerned, it is cer-
tainly in places inaccurate.
12. Alfredo Guevara, Sobre un debate entre cineastas cubanos, Cine Cubano
1415.
13. Toms Gutirrez Alea, Notas sobre una discusin de un documento sobre
una discusin (de otro documento), and Julio Garca Espinosa, Galgos y Poden-
cos, both in La Gaceta de Cuba 29 (November 5, 1963).
14. Ulive, Crnica del cine cubano.
15. Adolfo Snchez Vsquez, Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics (Lon-
don: Merlin Press, 1973).
16. Julio Garca Espinosa, Antecendentes para un estudio del cine cubano, in-
terview in Primer Plano (Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaiso) 1:2 (autumn 1972).
17. Discussion with Jorge Fraga Recorded in Havana, Undercut 12 (summer
1984).
18. Ibid.
19. Julianne Burton, Individual Fulllment and Collective Achievement, an In-
terview with T. G. Alea, Cineaste 8:1 (1977).
20. Conversation with Alfredo Guevara, Havana, September 1979.
21. Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 394.
22. Torres and Prez Estremera, Breve historia del cine cubano.
23. Conversation with Jorge Fraga, Havana, January 1980.
24. Ral Molina, En das como aqullas, La Gaceta de Cuba 50 (AprilMay 1966).

9. The Documentary in the Revolution

1. Quoted in Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary, Cinema One
Series No. 21 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 138.
2. Toms Gutirrez Alea, Free Cinema, Cine Cubano 4.
 Notes to Chapter 9 505

3. Quoted in Louis Marcorelles, Living Cinema, trans. Isabel Quigley (London:

Allen and Unwin, 1973), 47.
4. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 23233.
5. Dziga Vertov, Writings, Film Culture 25 (1962), 55, 57.
6. Mick Eaton, ed., AnthropologyRealityCinema: The Films of Jean Rouch
(London: British Film Institute, 1979), 42.
7. Lucien Goldmann, Thoughts on Chronique dun t, in ibid., 66.
8. Rgis Debray, Prison Writings, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Penguin,
1975), 17679.
9. See K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution,
trans. Arnold Pomerans (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 7.
10. Conversation with Richard Leacock, Paris, April 1980.
11. Chris Marker, Lavant-scne du cinma 6 (1961).
12. Alfredo Guevara, Revisando nuestro trabajo, Cine Cubano 2: 14.
13. Quoted in Marcorelles, Living Cinema, 19.
14. Joris Ivens en Cuba, Cine Cubano 3: 21.
15. This and other details are from a conversation with Joris Ivens, Paris, spring
1980.
16. Cine Cubano 3: 22.
17. Jos Massip, Crnicas de un viaje: Una leccin de cine, Cine Cubano 3: 24.
18. Joris Ivens, The Camera and I (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1969), 5657.
19. Tom Waugh, Joris Ivens Work in Cuba, Jump Cut 22: 28.
20. Richard Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), 62.
21. Mario Tejada, Introduccin al cine documental cubano, Hablamos de Cine
(Peru) 64: 30.
22. Mario Piedra, El documental cubano a mil caracteres por minuto, Cine
Cubano 108 (1984).
23. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Hacia un tercer cine, Tricontinental
13 (October 1969), translated in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New
Latin American Cinema (London: British Film Institute/Channel 4, 1983).
24. Interview with Jorge Silva and Marta Rodrguez by Andrs Caicedo and Luis
Ospina, Ojo al cine 1 (1974).
25. Cine y subdesarrollo, entrevista a Fernando Birri, Cine Cubano 4244 (1963).
26. Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom (Harmondsworth: Penguin Educa-
tion, 1972), 52.
27. Interview with Eduardo Maldonado by Andrs de Luna and Susana Cha-
rand, Otro Cine 6 (1976).
28. Vctor Casaus, El genero testimonio en el cine cubano, paper presented to
seminar on the New Cinema and Literature, Second Havana Festival, 1980; in Cine
Cubano 101 (1982).
29. Pastor Vega, El documental didctico y la tctica, Pensamiento Crtico 42
(1970): 99.
30. Jorge Fraga, Estrella Pantin, and Julio Garca Espinosa, El cine didctico,
Cine Cubano 6970, translated as Towards a Denition of the Didactic Documen-
tary, in Zuzana Pick, ed., Latin American Film Makers and the Third Cinema (Lon-
don: Carleton University Film Studies Program, 1978), 200.
 506 Notes to Chapter 11

31. Ral Beceyro, Cine y poltica (Caracas, 1976), Direccin General de Cultura, 27.
32. Pierre Francastel, Espace et Illusion, Revue Internationale de Filmologie 2:5
(1951).
33. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1972), 3233.
34. Interview with Jorge Silva and Marta Rodrguez by Andrs Caicedo and Luis
Ospina.

10. The Revolution in the Documentary

1. Quoted in Hans Ehrmann, Cubas Films, Variety, April 26, 1967.

2. Conversation with Santiago lvarez, Havana, January 1980.
3. Bertram Silverman, ed., Man and Socialism in Cuba, (New York: Atheneum,
1971), 17.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Santiago lvarez habla de su cine, Hablemos de Cine (Peru) 54: 39.
6. Quoted in Miguel Orodea, lvarez and Vertov, in M. Chanan, ed., Santiago
lvarez, BFI Dossier no. 2 (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 24.
7. Ibid., 25.
8. Conversation with Santiago lvarez.
9. Santiago lvarez habla de su cine, 39.
10. Conversation with Santiago lvarez.
11. Leo Brouwer speaking in New Cinema of Latin America, Part II, The Long
Road, dir. Michael Chanan, 1983.
12. Fidel Castro, speech of October 18, 1967, in Che Guevara, Reminiscences of the
Cuban Revolutionary War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
13. Romn Karmen, No pasarn!, (Moscow: Editorial Progreso, 1976), 368.
14. Stuart Hood, Murder on the Way, New Statesman, April 18, 1980.
15. Manuel Lpez Oliva, Imgenes de LBJ, El Mundo, December 13, 1968.
16. In Hablemos de Cine 54.
17. Hood, Murder on the Way.

11. The Current of Experimentalism

1. Personal communication from Steve Wilkinson, 2001.

2. The episode has a sequel. Cuba had withdrawn from international copyright
agreements on the grounds that culture was the patrimony of the people and from
a third-world point of view, copyright mainly served the interests of the transna-
tional corporations that collected most of it. Like so many others, Korda accepted
this position, and in any case there was no remedy until Cuba rejoined the interna-
tional copyright convention in the 1990s. Furthermore, that he was not particularly
concerned about authors rights can also be understood on the same principle that
a composer who hears his song being whistled in the street would hardly attempt to
sue the whistler for breaching his rights. He was happy enough that the image
served to sustain Ches memory. However, angered when the photo appeared in a
Smirno advertisement in the United Kingdom in 1999Che never drankhe
 Notes to Chapter 11 507

decided to take action, and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in London helped him
sue Smirnos advertising agency, Lowe Lintas, and the picture library Rex Features
for infringement. By happy coincidence, he received the news of an out-of-court
settlement on his seventy-second birthday, during a visit to London for an exhibi-
tion of Cuban photography; he immediately handed over an undisclosed sum for
damages to buy much-needed medicine for Cuban children.
3. See Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valds, Revolutionary Struggle 1947
1958: Selected Works of Fidel Castro, vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 141.
4. David: Mtodo o Actitud? Hablemos de Cine 54.
5. Ibid.
6. Jos Massip, David es el comienzo, Cine Cubano 4546 (1967).
7. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, June 1984.
8. Ibid.
9. Cf. B. Ruby Rich, Madcap Comedy Cuban Style, Jump Cut 22.
10. See Bernardo Callejas, La muerte de un burcrata, Granma, July 28, 1966,
and Desiderio Navarro, La muerte de un burcrata, Adelante (Camagey), August
23, 1966.
11. In Mario Rodrguez Alemn.
12. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, January 1980.
13. Rich, Madcap Comedy Cuban Style.
14. Callejas, La muerte de un burcrata.
15. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, January 1980.
16. Resultados de una discusin crtica, Cine al da 12 (March 1971).
17. Pablo Martnez, Entrevista con Humberto Sols, Hablemos de Cine 54.
18. Vanguardia (Santa Clara), December 26, 1967.
19. Verde Olivo, October 1, 1967.
20. Julio Garca Espinosa en dos tiempos, Hablemos de Cine 54.
21. See Julio Garca Espinosa, A propsito de Aventuras de Juan Quin Quin,
Cine y Revolucin en Cuba (Barcelona: Editorial Fontamara, 1975), 15760.
22. Anna Marie Taylor, Imperfect Cinema, Brecht and The Adventures of Juan
Quin Quin, Jump Cut 20.
23. See Fotonovelas: la realidad entre parntesis, in Michle Mattelart, La cul-
tura de la opresin femenina (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1977); see also Fellinis rst
solo lm as director, Lo Sceicco Bianco.
24. Garca Espinosa, A propsito de Avenfuras de Juan Quin Quin.
25. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Havana, January 1980.
26. In James Hogg, ed., Psychology and the Visual Arts (London: Penguin, 1969),
114; see also Anton Ehrenzweig, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), especially chapter 2.
27. Bell Gale Chevigny, Running the Blockade: Six Cuban Writers, Socialist Re-
view 59 (1981): 92.
28. Quoted in Herbert Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 106.
29. Conversation with Alfredo Guevara, Havana, January 1980.
30. Alonso guilar, The Intellectuals and the Revolution, Monthly Review 19:10
(March 1968). Participants from Britain, who numbered twenty-three, included Arnold
Wesker, Nathaniel Tarn, David Mercer, Adrian Mitchell, Ralph Milliband, Eric Hob-
sbawm, David Cooper, and Irving Teitelbaum. Bertrand Russell, like Sartre and
 508 Notes to Chapter 12

Ernst Fischer, sent a message of support. The U.S. delegation included Jules Feier,
David Dellinger, Barbara Dane, and Irwin Silber. Among others from Europein-
cluding sixty-six from France, twenty-seven from Spain, and twenty-ve from
Italywere Michel Leiris, Jorge Semprun, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Rossana
Rossanda. From Latin America and the Caribbean, apart from the host country,
there were seventy-ve. The Antilleans included C. L. R. James, Aim Csaire, John
La Rose, Andrew Salkey, Ren Depestre; the continental Latins, Mario Benedetti,
Julio Cortzar, Adolfo Snchez Vsquez, and others.
31. Andrew Salkey, Havana Journal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 110.
32. Ibid., 118.
33. See Ambrosio Fornet, El intellectual y la sociedad, Coleccin Mnima no. 28
(Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1969).
34. Adolfo Snchez Vsquez, Vanguardia artstica y vanguardia poltica, in Li-
teratura y arte nuevo en Cuba (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1977).
35. Che Guevara, Socialism and Man in Cuba and other works (Havana: Insti-
tuto del Libro, 1968).
36. Second Declaration of Havana, February 4, 1962, in Fidel Castro Speaks (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 127.
37. Fidel Castro, speech of September 28, 1967, Granma Weekly Review, October
8, 1967.
38. Fidel Castro, speech of January 12, 1968, Granma Weekly Review, January 21,
1968.

12. Four Films

1. Entrevista con Jorge Fraga con la participacin de Manuel Octavio Gmez,

Hablemos de Cine 54.
2. The letter from Mximo Gmez is to his wife, dated July 27, 1896.
3. See Nstor Garca Miranda, La odisea del General Jos de Jorge Fraga,
Hablemos de Cine 54.
4. Che Guevara, The Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara (London: Bertrand Rus-
sell Peace Foundation, n.d.), 136.
5. Garca Miranda, La odisea del General Jos de Jorge Fraga.
6. Marta Alvear, Interview with Humberto Sols, Jump Cut 19.
7. Teresa Fernndez Coca, Interview with Humberto Sols, Granma, October
23, 1968.
8. Anna Marie Taylor, Luca, Film Quarterly 28:2 (winter 197475); John Mraz,
Luca: History and Film in Revolutionary Cuba, Film and History 5:1 (1975).
9. Steven Kovacs, Lucia: Style and Meaning in Revolutionary Film, Monthly
Review 27:2 (1975): 34.
10. Isaac Len Frias, Luca, Hablemos de Cine 54.
11. Fernndez Coca interview.
12. Taylor, Lucia.
13. Peter Biskind, LuciaStruggles with History, Jump Cut 2 (1974).
14. Resultados de una discusin crtica, Cine al da 12 (March 1971).
15. Daniel Daz Torres, Lucia, Granma Weekly Review, October 20, 1968.
16. Puri Faget, Luca, un punto de partida, El Mundo (Havana), October 15, 1968.
 Notes to Chapter 13 509

17. Glauber Rocha, The Aesthetics of Violence, Revista Civilizaao Brasileira 3

(1965); translated in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin Amer-
ican Cinema (London: British Film Institute/Channel 4, 1983).
18. See Manuel Octavio Gmez, Entrevista con Jorge Fraga.
19. John Mraz, Lucia: Visual Style and Historical Portrayal, Jump Cut 19.
20. Michael Myerson, ed., Memories of Underdevelopment: The Revolutionary
Films of Cuba (New York: Grossman, 1973), 118.
21. Ibid., 43.
22. Toms Gutirrez Alea, Memorias del subdesarrollo, notas de trabajo, Hable-
mos de Cine 54.
23. See the citation of Vincent Canbys review in Granma, Elogian crticos
norteamericanos lme cubano, June 13, 1973.
24. See Julianne Burton, Interview with Alea, Cineaste 8:1: 59.
25. Myerson, Memories of Underdevelopment, 34.
26. Ibid., 36.
27. Ibid., 3435.
28. See Pastor Vega, Medida torpe y arbitraria de los imperialistas yanquis,
Granma, January 22, 1974.
29. Ibid.
30. Burton, Interview with Alea.
31. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, January 1980.
32. Interview with Manuel Octavio Gmez, Hablemos de Cine 54.

13. Imperfect Cinema and the Seventies

1. First published in Cine Cubano 4244 (1967); translated in Michael Chanan,
ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: British Film In-
stitute/Channel 4, 1983).
2. Julio Garca Espinosa, Meditations on Imperfect Cinema . . . Fifteen Years
Later, trans. Michael Chanan, Screen 26:34 (1985): 93.
3. Rigoberto Lpez, Hablar de Sara, de cierta manera, Cine Cubano 93: 11011.
4. Juan M. Bullitta, in Hablemos de Cine 54.
5. Granma, April 14, 1972.
6. Stuart Hood, Murder on the Way, New Statesman, April 18, 1980.
7. Arthur MacEwan, Revolution and Economic Development in Cuba (London:
Macmillan, 1981), 117.
8. Jorge Edwards, Persona Non Grata, trans. Colin Harding (London: Bodley
Head, 1976), 229.
9. Ambrosio Fornet, Trente and de cinma dans la Rvolution, in Paulo Anto-
nio Paranagua, ed., Le Cinma cubain (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), 91.
10. Ambrosio Fornet, Introduction, in Antonio Fornet, ed., Bridging Enigma:
Cubans on Cuba, Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 96:1 (winter 1997): 11.
11. Rufo Caballero and Joel del Ro, No hay cine adulto sin hereja sistemtica,
Temas 3 (1995).
12. Quoted in Mara Teresa Linares, La msica popular (Havana: Instituto del Li-
bro, 1970), 18.
13. Enrique Colina and Daniel Daz Torres, Ideologa del melodrama en el riejo
cine latinoamericano, Cine Cubano 7375.
 510 Notes to Chapter 15

14. During a viewing of the lm with Toms Gutirrez Alea in Havana, July 1984.
15. Alejo Carpentier, Music in Cuba, ed. Timothy Brennan, trans. Alan West-
Durn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 79.
16. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), 99.
17. Julianne Burton, Marginal Cinemas and Mainstream Critical Theory, Screen
26:34 (1985): 14.
18. Philip French, Crucied in Cuba, Observer, March 11, 1979.
19. Dennis West, Slavery and Cinema in Cuba: The Case of Gutirrez Aleas
The Last Supper, Western Journal of Black Studies 3:2 (summer 1979).

14. One Way or Another

1. Julio Garca Espinosa, in Rencontres Internationales pour un Nouveau Cinma,

Cahiers No. 3, Montreal, 1975, 25.
2. Discussion with Jorge Fraga, Undercut 12 (summer 1984).
3. Ambrosio Fornet, Trente ans de cinma dans la Rvolution, in Paulo Anto-
nio Paranagua, ed., Le Cinma cubain (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), 9596.
4. John Hess, The Personal Is Political in Cuba, Jump Cut 20: 15.
5. Interview in Romances, April 1974.
6. Conversation with Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, June 1984.
7. Quoted in Rigoberto Lpez, Hablar de Sara, de cierta manera, Cine
Cubano 93.
8. Ibid.
9. Julia Lesage, One Way or Another: The Revolution in Action, Jump Cut 19
(December 1978): 33.
10. Annette Kuhn, Womens Pictures, Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1982), 163.
11. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen,
1983), 193.
12. Conversation with Jorge Sotolongo, Oberhausen, 1981.

15. Reconnecting

1. Ambrosio Fornet in New Cinema of Latin America, Part I, Cinema of the

Humble, dir. Michael Chanan, 1983.
2. Figures taken from Ambrosio Fornet, Trente ans de cinma dans la Rvolu-
tion, in Paulo Antonio Paranagua, ed., Le Cinma cubain, (Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou, 1990), 105.
3. John King, Magical Reels (London: Verso, 1990), 159.
4. Peter B. Schumann, Historia del cine latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: Legasa,
1986), 175.
5. Julianne Burton, Film and Revolution in Cuba: The First Twenty-Five Years,
in Michael T. Martin, ed., The New Latin American Cinema, vol. 2, Studies of Na-
tional Cinemas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 133.
6. Julio Garca Espinosa, Rencontres Internationales pour un Nouveau Cinma,
Cahiers No. 3, Montreal, 1975, 25.
 Notes to Chapter 15 511

7. Here I can add my own personal testimony, dating from 1983, when I was in-
vited to show a pair of documentaries I made for Channel 4 (United Kingdom) on
the New Latin American Cinema to one of these internal icaic screenings. What
could have been a rather unnerving experience, especially because icaic itself was
featured in the lms, became a memorable one precisely because of the open and
inclusive spirit of the gathering.
8. Discussion with Jorge Fraga, Undercut (London Film-makers Co-op) 12
(summer 1984): 7.
9. Ambrosio Fornet, Introduction, in Ambrosio Fornet, ed., Bridging Enigma:
Cubans on Cuba, Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 96:1 (winter 1997): 1112.
10. Jean Stubbs, Cuba: The Test of Time (London: Latin American Bureau, 1989), 81.
11. Sergio Giral, Images and Icons, in Pedro Prez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs,
eds., Afrocuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (Lon-
don: Ocean/Latin American Bureau, 1993), 268.
12. See Alejandro de la Fuente and Laurence Glasco, Are Blacks Getting Out of
Control? Racial Attitudes, Revolution, and Political Transition in Cuba, in Miguel
ngel Centeno and Mauricio Font, Toward a New Cuba? (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1998).
13. Juan Carlos Tabo, in the entry for Pla! in Juan Antonio Garca Borrero,
Gua crtica del cine cubano de ccin (1910/1998) (Havana: Editorial Arte y Lite-
ratura, 2001).
14. Giral, Images and Icons, 266.
15. Jorge Fraga, Underout 12 (summer 1984).
16. Fornet, in Trente ans de cinma dans la Rvolution, 92.
17. Ibid., 93.
18. Fraga, 11.
19. Ibid., 10.
20. Stubbs, Cuba, 19.
21. For details, see diagrams in Julianne Burton, in Paulo Antonio Paranagua,
ed., Le Cinma cubain (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), 13436.
22. Fraga, 10.
23. Fornet Trente ans de cinma dans la Rvolution, 99.
24. Julianne Burton, Seeing, Being, Being Seen: Portrait of Teresa, or Contra-
dictions of Sexual Politics in Contemporary Cuba, Social Text 4 (1991): 82.
25. Quoted in King, Magical Reeds, 159.
26. Schumann, Historia del cine latinoamericano, 174.
27. Pat Aufderheide and Carlos Galiano, Retrato de Teresa: Hacer por medio de
la ccin un reportaje de la vida actual en nuestra sociedad, Granma, July 24, 1979.
28. Julianne Burton, Portrait(s) of Teresa: Gender Politics and the Reluctant
Revival of Melodrama in Cuba Film, in Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R.
Welsch, eds., Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994), 307.
29. Ibid., 317.
30. Ibid., 305.
31. Burton, Seeing, Being, Being Seen, 91.
32. Ibid., 9394.
33. Ibid., 86.
34. Publicity material distributed by Unilm, New York.
 512 Notes to Chapter 16

35. Pastor Vega, in New Cinema of Latin America, Part II, The Long Road, dir.
Michael Chanan, 1983.
36. Quoted in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Cinema in
Latin America (London: British Film Institute/Channel 4, 1983), 2.
37. Mensaje a los pueblos del mundo a travs de la Tricontinental (1967), in
Ernesto Che Guevara: Obras (19571967), 2d ed. (Havana: Casa de las Amricas, 1977),
2:584.
38. Robert Stam, The Hour of the Furnaces and the Two Avant-Gardes, in Coco
Fusco, ed., Reviewing Histories: Selections from New Latin American Cinema (Bualo:
Hallwalls, 1987), 9192.
39. For a history of the concept of third cinema, see Michael Chanan, The Chang-
ing Geography of Third Cinema, Screen 38:4 (1997).
40. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, (1969), in
Chanan, Twenty-Five Years of the New Cinema in Latin America.
41. Fraga, 12.
42. Conversation with Ciro Durn, Havana, December 1979.
43. Interview with Melchor Casals in Susan Fanshel, A Decade of Cuban Docu-
mentary Film (New York: Young Filmmakers Foundation, 1982), 2122.
44. Interview with Jess Daz in Fanshel, A Decade of Cuban Documentary Film, 17.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 18.
47. Entry for Guardafronteras in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de
ccin.
48. Ibid.
49. Schumann, Historia del cine latinoamericano, 175.
50. Rufo Caballero and Joel del Ro, No hay cine adulto sin hereja sistemtica,
Temas, 3 (1995).
51. Paolo Antonio Paranagua, in Paranagua, La Cinma cubain, 142.
52. Reynaldo Gonzlez, A White Problem: Reinterpreting Cecilia Valds, in
Pedro Prez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afrocuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing
on Race, Politics and Culture (London: Ocean/Latin American Bureau, 1993), 2057.
53. Caballero and del Ro, No hay cine adulto sin hereja sistemtica.
54. Fredric Jameson, Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capi-
talism, Social Text 15 (1986): 69.
55. Humberto Sols, in the entry for Cecilia Valds in Garca Borrero, Gua
crtica del cine cubano de ccin.
56. See Paranagua, Le Cinma cubain, 14151.
57. Ibid., 147.
58. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Boston, April 16, 1997.

16. Return of the Popular

1. Julio Garca Espinosa in New Cinema of Latin America, Part I, dir. Michael
Chanan.
2. Rufo Caballero and Joel del Ro, No hay cine adulto sin hereja sistemtica,
Temas 3 (1995).
 Notes to Chapter 16 513

3. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Boston, April 16, 1997.

4. Ambrosio Fornet quoting Arturo Arias Polo, Revolucin y cultura (December
1988): 71, and Lourdes Pasalodos, Caimn Barbudo (November 1988): 31, in Paulo
Antonio Paranagua, Le Cinma cubain (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), 96.
5. Caballero and del Ro, No hay cine adulto sin hereja sistemtica.
6. Janette Habel, Cuba: The Revolution in Peril, trans. Jon Barnes (London:
Verso, 1991), 5960.
7. Conversations with Sergio Giral and Toms Gutirrez Alea, Havana, 198182.
8. See the entry for the lm in Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del
cine cubano de ccin (1910/1998) (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2001).
9. Conversation with Jess Daz, Madrid, April 1996.
10. See the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de
ccin.
11. Jess Daz, Les ds de la contemporanit: notes sur le cinma de ction
cubain, in Paranagua, Le Cinma cubain, 118.
12. Zuzana Pick, The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1993), 50.
13. Interview by Enrique Colina in Toms Gutirrez Alea poesa y revolucin (Fil-
moteca Canaria, 1994), 184; see also New Cinema of Latin America, Part II, The
Long Road, dir. Michael Chanan, 1984.
14. Pick, The New Latin American Cinema, 5152.
15. Catherine Davies, Screen 38:4 (1997): 350.
16. Marvin DLugo, Transparent Women: Gender and Nation in Cuban Cin-
ema, in Michael T. Martin, ed., The New Latin American Cinema, vol. 2, Studies of
National Cinemas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 157.
17. See Habel, Cuba, 8185.
18. DLugo, Transparent Women, 159.
19. J. R. Macbean, A Dialogue with Toms Gutirrez Alea on the Dialectics of
the Spectator in Hasta Cierto Punto, Film Quarterly 38:2229 (1985).
20. Davies, 349.
21. Pick, The New Latin American Cinema, 51.
22. Jorge Runelli, Casa de las Amricas 203: 11.
23. Toms Gutirrez Alea, The Viewers Dialectic (Havana: Editorial Jos Mart,
1988), 17. Subsequent references are given in the text.
24. Testimony of Juan Carlos Tabo in the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero,
Gua crtica del cine cubano de ccin.
25. Personal communication.
26. Jorge Fraga, Undercut 12 (summer 1984): 11.
27. Julio Garca Espinosa speaking at uneac, December 2000.
28. Peter B. Schumann, Historia del cine latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: Legasa,
1986), 177.
29. Ibid.
30. My interpretation of Jess Dizs observations in Parangua, Le Cinma
cubain, 115.
31. Tabo, in the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano
de ccin.
32. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, April 16, 1997.
 514 Notes to Chapter 16

33. Catherine Benamou, Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of Gender, in Diana

Robin and Ira Jae, eds., Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the
Third World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 8586.
34. See Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, El cine cubano sumegido, Antenas, Ter-
cera poca 1 (JulySeptember 1999): 4046.
35. Michael Chanan, Report on Havana Film Festival, Framework 12 (1980).
36. See Habel, Cuba, 3943.
37. Ibid., 69.
38. Rolando Prez Betancourt, Rollo crtico (Havana: Editorial Pablode la Torriete,
1990), 245.
39. Variety, January 1, 1986, 18.
40. Es una apuesta, no s si habr perdido, interview with Jess Daz, Cine
Cubano 113.
41. See the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de
ccin.
42. Julianne Burton, Film and Revolution in Cuba: The First Twenty-Five Years,
in Peter Steven, ed., Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics, and Counter Cinema (Toronto:
Between the Lines, 1985), 356.
43. Paulo Antonio Parangua, Letter from Cuba to an Unfaithful Europe: The
Political Position of the Cuban Cinema, Framework 38/39 (1992): 13.
44. Burton, Film and Revolution in Cuba, 356.
45. See the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de
ccin.
46. Quoted in Habel, Cuba, 15354.
47. Cuba from Inside, dir. Michael Chanan, Channel 4, 1986.
48. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 19141991,
(London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 478.
49. Ibid., 476.
50. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa recorded in Boston, April 16, 1997.
51. Prez Betancourt, Rollo crtico, 250.
52. See Habel, Cuba, 59.
53. Fornet, in Paranagua, Le Cinma cubain, 104 n. 69.
54. The titles included another lm by Littin, shot in Nicaragua, Alsino y el Condor
(1982); Guzmns La rosa de los vientos (1983); Alberto Durants Los ojos del pero (1981)
and Malabrigo (1986); Federico Garcas Tpac Amaru (1984); Jorge Al Trianas
Tiempo de morir (1985); and Birris Un seor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988).
55. Personal communication.
56. Eduardo Lpez Morales, quoted in the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero,
Gua crtica del cine cubano de ccin.
57. Paranagua, Letter from Cuba to an Unfaithful Europe, 12.
58. Cuban Cinema in the Revolution (Pacique Cinemateque): http://www.
cinematheque.bc.ca/previous/ja98cuba.html.
59. John King, Magical Reels (London: Verso, 1990), 163.
60. See Prez Betancourt, Rollo crtico, 258.
61. Jess Daz, in Paranagua, Le Cinma cubain, 115.
62. See Mario Naito, entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine
cubano de ccin, and Catherine Davies, Recent Cuban Fiction Films: Identica-
tion, Interpretation, Disorder, Bulletin of Latin American Research 15:2 (1996): 191.
 Notes to Chapter 17 515

63. Quoted in Davies, Recent Cuban Fiction Films, 186.

64. Parangua, Letter from Cuba to an Unfaithful Europe, 10.
65. Prez Betancourt, Rollo crtico, 268.
66. Paranagua, Letter from Cuba to an Unfaithful Europe, 12.
67. Quoted in the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano
de ccin.
68. Paranagua, Letter from Cuba to an Unfaithful Europe, 9.
69. Orlando Rojas, Por un cine incmodo, Cine Cubano 130.

17. Wonderland

1. Janette Habel, 191.

2. David Craven, The Visual Arts since the Cuban Revolution, Third Text 20
(1992): 91.
3. Jay Murphy, The Young and Restless in Havana, Third Text 20 (1992): 116.
4. Rafael Hernndez, Mirar a Cuba (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubana, 1999),
9697.
5. Unpublished discussion paper by Toms Gutirrez Alea, read to icaic in
1991.
6. Murphy, The Young and Restless in Havana, 117.
7. When the Books Run Out, Economist, February 9, 1991.
8. See the entry for the lm in Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del
cine cubano de ccin (1910/1998) (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2001), and
Sergio Giral interviewed in Pedro Prez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afrocuba: An
Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (London: Ocean/Latin
American Bureau, 1993), 269.
9. Paulo Antonio Paranagua, Letter from Cuba to an Unfaithful Europe: The
Political Position of the Cuban Cinema, Framework 38/39 (1992): 16.
10. Zuzana Pick, The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1993), 79.
11. See the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de
ccin.
12. See the entry for the lm in ibid.
13. See Cuban Cinema in the Revolution (Pacique Cinemateque): http://
www.cinematheque.bc.ca/previous/ja98cuba.html.
14. Quoted in Catherine Davies, Screen 38:4 (1997): 182.
15. Ibid.
16. See the entry for Pla! in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de ccin.
17. Enrique Colina, El cine cubano: Dentro y fuera de la pantalla, unpublished
manuscript, 1995.
18. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Boston, April 16, 1997.
19. Conversation with Daniel Daz Torres, Havana, December 1995.
20. Conversation with Jess Daz, Madrid, April 1996.
21. Conversation with Julio Garca Espinosa, Boston, April 16, 1997. Aldana lost
his job a year later in a leadership shake-up.
22. Castro himself may have seen the lm in April. I happened to be on a visit to
Cuba while these events were unfolding, and on asking to see the lm was told
 516 Notes to Chapter 17

apologetically that this was unfortunately not possible, because the only available
copy was at that moment being viewed in high places.
23. Arturo Arango, Manuel Prez o el ejercicio de la memoria, La Gaceta de
Cuba, SeptemberOctober 1997.
24. The group included Santiago lvarez, Titn (Toms Gutirrez Alea), Am-
brosio Fornet, Senel Paz, Juan Carlos Tabo, Pastor Vega, Juan Padrn, Mario Rivas,
Rebeca Chvez, Enrique Colina, Jorge Luis Snchez, Daniel Daz Torres, Fernando
Prez, Orlando Rojas, Rolando Daz, Guillermo Centeno, Humberto Sols. Inter-
view with Manuel Prez, Havana, January 1980.
25. Interview with Manuel Prez, Havana, January 1980.
26. Quoted in Paulo Antonio Paranagua, Cuban Cinemas Political Challenges,
in Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin American Cinema, vol. 2, Studies of National
Cinemas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 167.
27. Interview with Manuel Prez. Havana, January 1980.
28. A leading gure among Cubas writers and lmmakers, and, like Garca
Espinosa, a (onetime) member of the party, Daz left Cuba to teach in Berlin and
then moved to Madrid. There he edited a cultural journal promoting dialogue of
the left between Cuba and its migrs, an activity the regime he left behind dislikes
but does not impede beyond trying to dissuade contributors. He died in 2002.
29. See the entry for the lm in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de
ccin.
30. Conversation with Humberto Sols, Havana, December 1998.
31. Interview with Juan Carlos Tabo, Cineaste; interview with Toms Gutirrez
Alea by the author.
32. Jorge Yglesias, La espera del futuro, La Gaceta de Cuba 4 (JulyAugust 1994).
33. Ian Lumsden, Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1996), 194.
34. See John Hess, Melodrama, Sex, and the Cuban Revolution, Jump Cut 41: 120.
35. Ibid., 124.
36. Emilio Bejel, Fresa y chocolate o la salida de la guarida, Casa de las Amricas
35:196 (JuneSeptember 1994): 1022.
37. Hess, Melodrama, Sex, and the Cuban Revolution, 121.
38. Stephen Wilkinson, Homosexuality and the Repression of Intellectuals in
Fresa y chocolate and Mscaras, Bulletin of Latin American Research 18, no. 1 (1999):
1733.
39. Quoted in ibid., 19.
40. Senel Paz (1995), 78.
41. See Wilkinson, n. 1, citing Jorge Domnguez, Order and Revolution (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 357.
42. Bejel Fresa y chocolate o la salida de la guarida, 17.
43. Mirta Ibarra, Strawberry at the New York Film Festival: Interview with
Mirta Ibarra, Cuba Update (NovemberDecember 1994): 3435.
44. Hess, Melodrama, Sex, and the Cuban Revolution, 121.
45. Ibid., 122.
46. See Paul Julian Smith, Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature, and Sexuality in
Spain and Cuba, 19831993 (New York: Verso, 1996).
47. Bejel, Fresa y chocolate o la salida de la guarida, 16.
48. Hess, Melodrama, Sex, and the Cuban Revolution, 119.
 Notes to Chapter 17 517

49. Bejel, Fresa y chocolate o la salida de la guarida, 18.

50. Hess, Melodrama, Sex, and the Cuban Revolution, 120.
51. Bejel, Fresa y chocolate o la salida de la guarida, 15.
52. Interview with Toms Gutirrez Alea by Dennis West, Cineaste 22:12: 20.
53. Interview in El Mundo, April 30, 1994, section Cinelandia, 2.
54. Lumsden, Machos, Maricones, and Gays, 194.
55. Quoted in Hess, Melodrama, Sex, and the Cuban Revolution, 120.
56. Ibid.
57. Quoted in ibid.
58. El Pas, April 29, 1994, 38.
59. John Hess, The Revolution Will Be Melodramatized: Strawberry and Choco-
late as Teacherly and Readerly Text, photocopied paper, 1996.
60. Ibid.
61. Interview with Toms Gutirrez Alea by Michael Chanan, Encuentro de la
cultura cubana 1 (1996): 71.
62. Lumsden, Machos, Maricones, and Gays, 69.
63. Julio Csar Aguillera in Garca Borrero, Gua crtica del cine cubano de ccin.
64. Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (London: Pluto,
2001) 151.
65. Ibid., 156.
66. Colina, El cine cubano.
67. These gures are drawn from Roxana Pollo, Puede ser este un ao favorable
para la economa del cine cubano, Granma, May 1994, quoted in Diane Soles, The
Cuban Film Industry: Between a Rock and Hard Place, Global Development Studies
1:34 (winter 1998spring 1999): 1045 and 111.
68. Soles, The Cuban Film Industry, 112, 113 (retranslated from the Spanish
quotations in the footnotes on these pages).
69. Luciano Castillo, Lgrimas para un melodrama: hacia dnde va nuestro
cine, Antenas, Tercera poca 1 (JulySeptember 1999): 12.
70. Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, El cine cubano sumegido, Antenas, Tercera
poca 1 (JulySeptember 1999): 4046.
71. See Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, Los Talleres de Crtica Cinematogrca:
Estrategias desde el margen, in Juan Antonio Garca Borrero, ed., La ciudad sim-
blica: Memorias del 8vo Taller de Crtica Cinematogrca de Camagey (Camagey:
Editorial cana, 2000), 512.
72. Mario Naito in Garca Borrero, La ciudad simblica, 123.
73. Hernndez, Mirar a Cuba, 101.
74. Ibid., 109.
75. Dsire Daz, La Gaceta de Cuba (2000): 38.
76. Ivette Leyva, Arturo Sotto: Yo slo quiero saber, La Gaceta de Cuba, (Janu-
aryFebruary 1999): 29.
77. Daz, 38.
78. Anne Marie Stock, Migrancy and the Latin American Cinemascape: To-
wards a Post-National Critical Praxis, in Revista Canadiense de Estudio Hispnicos
20:1 (1995): 25. Subsequent references are given in the text.
79. Quoted in Daz, 39.
80. Ibid., 40.
81. Vladimir Cruz, Cine Cubano 148, 44.
This page intentionally left blank
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519
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Following the Index of Film Titles is an Index of Names.
Abaku, 318
ABC del etnocidio: Notas sobre
Mesquital, 383
Abril de Vietnam en el ao del Gato
(April in Vietnam in the Year of the
Cat), 19, 308
Acerca de un personaje que unos llaman
San Lzaro y otros llaman Babal
(About a personality some call San
Lazaro and others Babal), 235, 319
Acoso, El (The pursuit), 165
Adorables mentiras (Adorable lies), 453,
45456, 465, 46869, 471
Adriana. See Mujer transparente
A las madres cubanas (To Cuban
mothers), 117
Albergados, Los (Hostel-dwellers),
43132
Algo ms que piedra (Something more
than stone), 117
Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Alice
in Wondertown), 4, 10, 39394, 444,
446, 45761, 468, 482, 49495
All en el Rancho Grande, 321
Alsino y el cndor, 381
Amada, 402
Amor vertical, 12, 489, 491
Angola, victoria de la esperanza
(Angola, victory of hope), 308
Index of Film Titles
Ao de libertad, Un (A year of liberty),
131, 194
Ao Uno (First year), 343
Antonio das Mortes, 318, 475
Aquella larga noche (That long night),
367, 372
Asamblea general (General Assembly),
131
Ashes and Diamonds, 178
Atencin prenatal (Prenatal care), 204
Valparaiso, 203
Aventuras de Juan Quin Quin, Las (The
adventures of Juan Quin Quin), 6,
251, 25859, 307, 357, 397, 439, 458
Bastardo, El (The bastard), 85
Bataan, 156
Batalla de Chile, La, 381, 383
Batalla de Maip, La, 65
Batalla de Santa Clara, La. See Historias
de la Revolucin
Battle of Santiago Bay, The, 43
Bella del Alhambra, La, 1314, 433, 468
Bicycle Thieves, 109
Big House, The, 82
Birth of a Nation, The, 66
Blazing Saddles, 10
Boliche, 321
Borinage, 110
521
 522 Index
Brave One, The, 178
Brigadista, El (The literacy teacher), 8,
20, 33, 50, 334, 336, 359, 387
Brujo desapareciendo, El (The
disappearing magician), 53
Cancin del turista (Song of the
tourist), 225
Cantata de Chile, 36768, 392
Capablanca, 433
Caperucita roja, La (Little Red Riding
Hood), 104
Capitn mambi o libertadores y
guerrilleros, El, 66
Carnet de viaje (Travel notebook), 196
Carta a una madre (Letter to a
mother), 122
Cartas del parque (Letters from the
park), 14, 433
Casi varn (Almost masculine), 84
Cayita: Leyenda y Gesta (Cayita: The
Legend and the Face), 384
Cecilia, 4, 7, 9, 10, 328, 355, 365, 367,
38894, 455, 462
Cerro Pelado, 22324
Chacal de Nahualtoro, El, 381
Chapuceras (Sloppy work), 425
Chimes at Midnight, 28081
Chronique dun t, 19092, 250 Dersu Uzala, 274
Cicln (Hurricane), 22223, 234
Cine y azcar (Cinema and sugar), 56
Citizen Kane, 38, 40, 339
Clandestinos, 17, 111, 412, 430, 449, 455
Como la vida misma (Like life itself),
41819
Como, por qu y para qu se asesina un
general? (How, why, and wherefore is
a general assassinated?), 310
Confusin cotidiana, Una (An everyday
confusion), 104
Con las mujeres cubanas (With Cuban
women), 204
Construcciones rurales (Rural
construction), 125
Controversia, 384
Corazn sobre la tierra, El (Heart across
the land), 41718
Coronel Delmiro Gouvea, 382
Cranes Are Flying, The, 166
Crime de M. Lange, Le, 153
Crnica cubana (Cuban chronicle), 179
Cuba baila (Cuba dances), 144, 15052,
182, 357
Cuba 58, 144, 165, 180, 357
Cuba pueblo armado (Cuba, a people
armed), 196, 200
CubaSi! 193
Culloden, 304
Cultura Aborigen, 319
Cumbite, 144, 15760
Cumplimiento (Fulllment), 385
David, 128, 24951, 261
De Amrica soy hijo . . . y a ella me debo
(Born of the Americas), 19, 237, 240,
308, 310
De cierta manera (One way or another),
8, 13, 306, 316, 328, 332, 338, 34041,
34452, 360, 364, 366, 402, 4056
Decisin, La, 181
De dnde son los cantantes . . . ? (Where
do the singers come from?), 320
De la sierra hasta hoy (From the Sierra
to today), 117
De la tirana a la libertad (From
tyranny to liberty), 117
Desahucio, El (The sacking), 103
Desarraigo (Uprooted), 180
Desertor, El, 273
Desle gimnstico femenino (Feminine
gymnastic display), 104
Despegue a las 18.00 (Takeo at 18.00),
24046
De tal Pedro tal astilla (A chip o the
old block), 412, 417, 434
Deus e o Diablo na terra del sol (Black
god, white devil), 318
Da de noviembre, Un (A day in
November), 314, 363, 430
Da en el solar, Un (A day in the
tenement), 179
Das de agua, Los (Days of water), 312,
31718, 338, 390
Doce sillas, Las (The Twelve Chairs), 18,
92, 144, 160, 165, 357
 Index 523
Documental a proposito del trnsito, Un
(A documentary about trac), 343
Dolce Vita, La, 178
Drcula, 82
18681968, 273
Elefante y la bicicleta, El, 474
Elena, 165
Ellas (They), 250
Elpidio Valds, 35859, 372
En dias como estos (In days like these),
180
En el aire (In the air), 433, 435
En la otra isla (On the other island), 342
En tierra de Sandino (In the land of
Sandino), 19, 385, 386
Entre dos amores (Between two
loves), 74
En tres y dos, 412, 419
Escalada del chantaje (Escalation of
blackmail), 224
Esta tierra nuestra (This land of ours),
119, 125, 131
Esttica (Aesthetics), 425
Excursin a Vuelta Abajo (Trip to Vuelta
Abajo), 341
Exterminating Angel, The, 178
Extrao caso de Rachel K., El (The
strange case of Rachel K.), 5455, 334,
336, 367
Fakir, Un, 104
Fall of the House of Usher, The, 393
55 hermanos (55 brothers and sisters),
19, 385, 400
Fighting with Our Boys in Cuba, 43
Final, El (The ending), 165, 175
Flying Down to Rio, 86
Foto recorre al mundo, Una, 248
4000 Nios (4000 children), 383
Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and
chocolate), 2, 11, 22, 444, 456, 46374,
480, 488
Gallego, 433
Gamn, 20, 383
Ganga Zumba, 318
General Assembly. See Asamblea general
Gente en la playa (People at the beach),
130
Girn (Bay of Pigs), 19, 49, 50, 247, 328,
344, 372
Godfather II, 54
Guantanamera, 12, 47677, 480
Guardafronteras (Border guards), 387,
412
Guerra en Angola, La (The war in
Angola), 308
Guerra olvidada, La (The forgotten
war), 225, 236
Habana en agosto 1906, La (Havana in
August 1906), 54
Habanera, 410, 423, 434
Hablando del punto cubano (Speaking
of typical Cuban music), 323
Hanoi martes 13, 228, 234, 236
Hasta cierto punto (Up to a point), 14,
360, 364, 370, 383, 4026, 409, 412,
434, 453, 456, 473, 478
Hasta la victoria siempre (Always until
victory), 6, 23132, 247
Hello Hemingway, 449, 490
Hellzapoppin, 10
Herido, El (The wounded man). See
Historias de la Revolucin
Hiroshima mon amour, 164
Historia de una batalla (Story of a
battle), 201
Historia de una descarga (Story of an
unloading), 384
Historia de un ballet (Story of a ballet),
204
Historias de la Revolucin (Stories of
the Revolution), 144, 150, 168, 256, 357
Hombre de xito, Un, 430
Hombre de Maisinic, El (The man
from Maisinic), 8, 332, 33435, 359,
367, 40910
Hombres del caaveral (Men of sugar),
219, 22123, 236
Hombres del mal tiempo (Men of bad
times), 235, 273
Hora de los hornos, La (The hour of
the furnaces), 206, 379
How Woodbines Are Made, 96
 524 Index
Improper Conduct, 474
Intolerance, 66, 368
Intil muerte de mi socio Manolo, La
(The useless death of my buddy
Manolo), 434
Ir a Santiago (Im going to Santiago),
235, 341
Isabel. See Mujer transparente
Isla del Tesoro (Treasure Island), 342, 344
Isla para Miguel, Una (An island for
Miguel), 34243
Ivan the Terrible, 392
Jalisco nunca pierde, 321
Jaula, La (The cage), 164, 226
Jesus of Montreal, 489
Jbaro (Wild dog), 418
Joven rebelde, El (The young rebel), 144,
153, 157, 247, 255, 332, 357
Jues et Jim, 285
Julia. See Mujer transparente
Kramer vs. Kramer, 375
Laura. See Mujer transparente
LBJ, 6, 232, 23435, 241, 245
Lejana (Distance), 9, 10, 42044, 435,
488
Lista de espera, 22, 489, 494, 495
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,
The, 178, 181
Louisiana Story, 189
Luca, 5, 10, 255, 26162, 27388, 292,
294, 304, 316, 332, 357, 364, 373, 388,
392, 410
Madagascar, 22, 479, 488, 49092
Madera (Wood), 383
Madina-Boe, 236
Maluala, 56, 32729, 368, 382, 390
Mamb, 481
Man, El (Manna), 129
Manigua o la mujer cubana, La
(The countryside or the Cuban
woman), 66
Manuela, 251, 25556, 276, 286
Manuel Garca o el rey de los campos de
Cuba, 65
Mar, El (The sea), 180
Maria Antonia, 450
Megano, El, 36, 87, 10910, 125, 130,
149, 163
Me hice maestro (I became a teacher),
180
Mella, 98
Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories
of underdevelopment), 5, 10, 14, 20,
261, 267, 276, 288, 298, 3012, 315,
332, 339, 344, 402, 409, 422, 466, 473,
478, 482
Mesquital, 20
Mi hermano Fidel (My brother Fidel),
238
Minerva traduce el mar (Minerva
interprets the sea), 164
Miriam, Makeba, 322
Modern Times, 26, 254
Momentos de la vida de Mart. See La
rosa blanca
Montaa nos une, La (The mountains
unite us), 180
Morena clara, 321
Mother Joan of the Angels, 279
Muerte al invasor (Death to the
invader), 202
Muerte de J. J. Jones, La (The death of
J. J. Jones), 226
Muerte de un burcrata, La (The death
of a bureaucrat), 25154, 258, 357,
439, 457, 477
Mujer ante el espejo (Woman facing the
mirror), 414
Mujer transparente (Transparent
woman), 22, 45152, 488
Mujer, un hombre, una ciudad, Una
(A woman, a man, a city), 336, 339,
344, 346, 363, 366
Nazarn, 98
Negro, El, 129
Nobleza baturra, 321
No hay sbado sin sol (No Saturday
without sun), 367, 372
Notti di Cabiria, 397
Novia para David, Una (A girlfriend for
David), 412, 417, 434, 440
 Index 525
Now, 6, 193, 204, 219, 221, 22325, 228,
234
Nuestra olimpiada en la Habana (Our
Olympiad in Havana), 236
Nueva escuela, La (The new school), 19,
238, 240
October, 99, 475
Octubre de todos, El (Everyones Octo-
ber), 237
Odisea de General Jos, La (The odyssey
of General Jos), 6, 261, 273, 365
Ola, La, 479, 482, 489
Old Man and the Sea, The, 86
On the Bowery, 133
Oracin (Prayer), 414
Otro Cristbal, El (The other
Christopher), 179
Otro Francisco, El (The other Francisco),
7, 56, 5860, 32728, 36768, 390
Pginas del diario de Jos Mart (Pages
from the diary of Jos Mart), 6, 261,
312, 314
Pais, 147
Pjaros tirndole a la escopeta, Los
(Tables turned), 21, 32, 411, 412
Papeles secundarios (Supporting roles),
9, 44041, 443, 45556, 471
Papeles son papeles (Paper is paper), 180
Para quien baila La Habana (For whom
Havana dances), 166
Parque de Palatino, El, 54
Patakn, 397
Patrulla de Bataan, La, 156
Patty-Candela, 33435, 359, 367, 372
Pedro cero por ciento (Pedro zero per
cent), 417
Pelea cubana contra los demonios, Una
(A Cuban battle against the demons),
262, 281, 312, 315, 317
Piccolino, 321
Piedra sobre piedra (Stone upon stone),
308
Piropo, El, 384
Plcido, 450
Pla! o demasiado miedo a la vida, 10,
43640, 453, 45556, 459
Plano, El (The shot), 448
Playas del pueblo (Peoples beaches), 129
P.M., 5, 117, 13334, 136, 138, 141, 186, 188
Poder local, poder popular (Local power,
popular power), 343
Polvo rojo (Red dust), 119, 400401, 412
Pon tu pensamiento en m (Turn your
thoughts to me), 482, 489
Porkys, 417
Por primera vez (For the rst time), 25
26, 29, 3334, 235, 349
Por qu naci el Ejrcito Rebelde (Why
the Rebel Army Was Born), 131
Preludio 11, 166
Prensa seria, La (The serious press), 129
Presidio, El, 82
Primera carga al machete, La (The rst
machete charge), 6, 49, 50, 26163,
273, 281, 302, 304, 318, 338, 344, 409
Primero de enero (First of January), 411
Prisioneros desaparecidos (Disapeared
prisoners), 372, 432
Prisoner of Zenda, 74
Quatre cents coups, Les, 164
Qu buena canta Ud (How well you
sing), 321
Quinta frontera, La (The fth frontier),
308
Races (Roots), 98
Rain, 199, 230
Rancheador (Slave hunter), 56, 62,
32728, 368, 390
Realengo 18 (Plot 18), 130, 157
Rebeldes (Rebels). See Historias de la
Revolucin
Reina y Rey (Queen and king), 22,
478, 488
Repentance, 428
Retrato, El (The portrait), 165
Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa),
8, 34, 355, 35859, 364, 367, 372, 374,
37778, 40910, 438, 478
Revolucin de mayo, La (The May
revolution), 65
Ring, El, 235
Ro Almendares, 432
 526 Index
Ro Negro, 33435, 367, 372
Rio, quarenta graus (Rio, forty
degrees), 36
Rio, zona norte (Rio, north zone), 36
Ritmo de Cuba (Rhythm of Cuba), 130
Robo, El (The robbery), 180
Rosa blanca, La (The white rose), 86
Rumba, La, 322, 347
Salacin, La (The saltings), 18182
Secuencias inconclusas (Unnished
sequences), 12, 48284
Segunda hora de Esteban Zayas, La (The
second hour of Esteban Zayas), 410
Seine a recontr Paris, La, 203
Senso, 279
Se permuta (House for swap), 9, 411,
412, 419, 434, 456, 459, 478
79 primaveras (79 springs), 243, 245
Sexto aniversario (Sixth anniversary),
125, 194
Sierra Maestra, 117, 129
Siglo de las luces, El, 446, 46163
Sobre horas extras y trabajo voluntario
(On overtime and voluntary work),
344
Sobre un primer combate (On a rst
attack), 126
Sobrevivientes, Los (The survivors), 368
Solidaridad Cuba y Vietnam, 224
Sombras habaeras, 82
Song of the Clouds, 185
Son o no son, 320, 370, 396
Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), 166
Strangers May Kiss, 100
Sweet Charity, 397
Talco para lo negro (Talcum for the
black man), 489
Taste of Honey, A, 181
Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, 44
Teasing the Gardener, 26
Techo de vidrio (Glass roof), 398, 419, 435
Tercer mundo, tercera guerra mundial
(Third world, third world war), 308,
396
Thrse, 285
Threepenny Opera, 397
Throw Us a Dime, 35
Tiburn, 85
Tiempo de amar (Time to love), 410
Tiempo de morir, 421
Tiempos del joven Mart, Los (The times
of the young Mart), 131
Tierra, amor y dolor (Earth, love, and
distress), 85
Tierra olvidada (Forgotten land), 130
Tierra y el cielo, La (Heaven and earth),
368
Tigre salt y mat, pero morir . . .
morir, El (The tiger pounced and
killed but hell die, hell die), 310
Tire die (Throw Us a Dime), 35
Titanic, 1
Toma de la Habana por los ingleses,
La (The Taking of Havana by the
English), 131
Torero! 98
Trnsito (Trac), 179
Transporte Popular (Public transport),
431
Tres tristes tigres, 380
Trouble with Harry, The, 252
Tulipa, 251, 25658, 260
Turista en la Habana, Un (A tourist in
Havana), 54
Ugetsu monogatari, 275
ltima cena, La (The Last Supper), 56,
327, 329, 365, 368, 38990, 422
Umberto D., 478
Under the Texas Moon, 100
Up to a Point. See Hasta cierto punto
Ustedes tienen la palabra (Now its up
to you), 33637, 366
Valparaiso mi amor, 380
Vals de La Habana Vieja (Waltz of Old
Havana), 433
Vampiros en la Habana, 435
Varadero, 104
Vecinos, 425
Vida de los peces, La (The life of the
sh), 104
Vida en rosa, La (A rosy life), 434
Vida es silbar, La, 22, 489, 492
 Index 527
Vida y triunfo de un pura sangre criollo
(Life and triumph of a pur-blood
Creole), 104
Vie de Crateau, La, 253
Virgen de la caridad, La (The Virgin of
Charity), 83
Viridiana, 178
Viuda de Montiel, La, 432
Viva la Repblica, 38, 48, 308
Vivienda, La (Housing), 120, 131
Volpone, 85
West Side Story, 286, 398
Yanki No! 19293
Y el cielo fue tomado por asalto (And
heaven was taken by storm), 19, 237
Y. . . tenemos sabor (And . . . weve got
taste), 319, 322, 342
Zafra o sangre y azcar, La (The sugar
harvest or blood and sugar), 66
Zoe. See Mujer transparente
This page intentionally left blank
 Index of Names
Preceding the Index of Names is an Index of Film Titles.

Abuladze, Tengiz, 428 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 280, 289, 300

Acosta, Armando, 119 Arago, Dominic Franois Jean, 46
Adorno, Theodor, 71, 232 Arenal, Humberto, 125
Agramonte, Arturo, 83, 1034, 106 Argelles, Gloria, 109
Aguilar, Alonso, 365 Arias, Imanol, 391
Aguillera, Julio Csar, 474 Aristarco, Guido, 33233
Aguirre, Mirta, 107 Armengol, Alejandro, 4344
Akerman, Chantal, 375 Astaire, Fred, 86
Alazraki, Benito, 98 Astruc, Alexandre, 195
Alberto, Eliseo, 365, 393 Ayala Blanco, Jorge, 85
Aldana, Carlos, 459, 461
Alea. See Gutirrez Alea, Toms Bachlin, Peter, 7273
Allen, Woody, 455 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10, 426
Allende, Salvador, 310, 313, 38081 Balazs, Bla, 109, 148
Almendros, Nstor, 15, 90, 104, 130, 135 Balmaseda, Mario, 346, 434
36, 18081, 474 Ban, Antonio, 28
Almodvar, Pedro, 455 Barbachano Ponce, Manuel, 98, 151
Alonso, Alberto, 180 Barbaro, Umberto, 148
Alonso, Alicia, 493 Barnet, Miguel, 210, 263, 433
Alterio, Ernesto, 481 Barthes, Roland, 95
lvarez, Enrique, 482, 489 Bartok, Bla, 171
lvarez, Federico, 266 Batista, Fulgencio, 15, 34, 36, 86, 98,
lvarez, Santiago, 6, 19, 20, 109, 119, 202, 1057, 11014, 11719, 124, 138, 140,
204, 21011, 219, 22225, 22746, 251, 413, 430
261, 305, 30811, 335, 344, 356, 360, 413, Bazin, Andr, 148
414, 432, 455, 489 Beatles, The, 264
Amet, Edward H., 44 Beauvoir, Simone de, 7
Anderson, Lindsay, 186 Beceyro, Ral, 216
Anreus, Idalia, 183, 278, 36465 Beckett, Samuel, 230

529
 530 Index
Beery, Wallace, 82
Behn, Hernand, 92
Behn, Sosthenes, 92
Bejel, Emilio, 466, 46971
Belafonte, Harry, 9, 378, 416
Bellay, 268
Bemberg, Mara Luisa, 364
Benamou, Catherine, 414
Benavides, Miguel, 275
Benedetti, Mario, 5, 26668
Benjamin, Walter, 16, 18, 189, 324
Benton, Robert, 375
Berg, Alban, 171
Bergman, Ingmar, 280
Bernaza, Luis Felipe, 320, 384, 412,
417, 433
Bernstein, Leonard, 286
Birri, Fernando, 3536, 2068, 416, 432
Birtwistle, Harrison, 171
Biskind, Peter, 27879, 28485
Blackton, Jim, 4243
Blanco, Desiderio, 250
Blanco, Juan, 110, 125
Bolaos, Elena, 490
Bolvar, Simn, 56
Boorstein, Edward, 119, 128, 132
Borges, Jorge Luis, 295
Boulez, Pierre, 171
Braithwaite, Edward, 325
Braque, Georges, 171
Brault, Michel, 190
Brecht, Bertolt, 207, 250, 270, 397,
408, 425
Breton, Andr, 139, 269
Bronte, Emily, 277
Brooks, Mel, 160, 396
Brouwer, Leo, 109, 225, 22930, 241, 263,
265, 28586, 368, 392, 402
Browning, Tod, 82
Bullitta, Juan M., 235, 309
Buuel, Luis, 12, 178, 253, 280, 329, 490
Buria Prez, Lzaro, 68
Burton, Julianne, 175, 296, 301, 359, 372
76, 424, 426
Byron, Lord, 62
Caballero, Rufo, 313, 367, 388, 39193,
396, 398, 414, 418, 434, 442, 486
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 122, 124,
13335, 312, 474
Cabrera Infante, Saba, 133
Callejas, Bernardo, 25455
Calvino, Italo, 7
Calvo, Sara, 4344
Canby, Vincent, 300
Canedo, Roberto, 86
Canel, Fausto, 165, 179, 180, 313
Cardenal, Ernesto, 170, 414
Cardona, Ren, 82
Cardoso, Onelio Jorge, 166
Carmichael, Stokey, 268
Carpentier, Alejo, 62, 95, 103, 145, 268,
286, 323, 461, 462
Carroll, Lewis, 458
Carter, Jimmy, 401
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 193
Casal, Lourdes, 423
Casals, Melchor, 38485
Casass, Jos E., 53, 56
Casaus, Vctor, 21011, 41819
Castellanos, Jess, 64
Castellanos, Zaida, 490
Castilla, Luciano, 481
Castilla, Sergio, 372, 432
Castro, Fidel, 15, 7, 9, 11, 15, 19, 35, 105
6, 11114, 117, 12025, 12829, 133, 138
41, 159, 16768, 171, 176, 179, 182, 193,
19697, 2012, 213, 22226, 23132,
234, 23738, 240, 24243, 248, 254,
258, 261, 26364, 268, 272, 275, 288,
3083, 357, 369, 384, 399, 401, 416, 419,
428, 44446, 459, 463, 468, 473, 495
Castro, Ral, 121, 124
Catherwood, Frederick, 45
Cavafy, Constantin, 464
Cavell, Stanley, 80
Cech, Vladimir, 166
Cervantes, Ignacio, 465
Csaire, Aim, 325, 327
Cspedes, 210
Chabrol, Claude, 164
Chambi, Manuel, 379
Chaplin, Charles, 26, 73, 160, 252, 254
Charn, 414
Chaskel, Pedro, 24748, 381
Chateaubriand, Vicomte de, 62
 Index 531

Chvez, Amanda, 12, 482 de la Uz, Laura, 490

Chvez, Carlos, 286 del Casal, Julin, 64, 466
Chvez, Rebeca, 414 Delgado, Livio, 10, 374, 392, 402, 430,
Chiarini, Luigi, 109 462
Chibas, Eduardo, 111 del Llano, Eduardo, 21
Chijona, Gerardo, 453 del Monte, Domingo, 59, 60
Chocolatn, 235 del Pino, Rafael, 210
Chopin, Frderic, 285 del Rio, Dolores, 86, 277
Christensen, Theodor, 250 del Ro, Joel, 313, 317, 367, 388, 39193,
Christie, Julie, 9 396, 398, 414, 418, 434, 442, 486
Cienfuegos, Camilo, 35, 119 DeMille, Cecil B., 84
Cienfuegos, Osmani, 197 De Niro, Robert, 9, 378, 416
Clark, Bob, 417 Depestre, Ren, 298
Claxton, Samuel, 365, 398 De Sica, Vittorio, 109, 478
Colina, Enrique, 7879, 81, 261, 321, Desnoes, Edmundo, 12223, 289, 296,
403, 425, 457, 478 298
Colomo, Fernando, 481 Daz, Dsire, 22, 446, 48790, 494
Coppola, Francis Ford, 9, 5455, 378, Daz, Elena, 278, 280, 285
416 Daz, Jess, 7, 9, 19, 21, 119, 362, 38387,
Corrieri, Sergio, 289, 33435, 418, 422 400, 402, 407, 411, 412, 419, 420, 422
Cortzar, Julio, 266 23, 426, 430, 438, 459, 461, 488
Cortzar, Octavio, 8, 20, 25, 126, 204, Daz, Porrio, 79
235, 319, 323, 334, 359, 367, 387, 412, Daz, Rolando, 32, 384, 41012, 419, 434
414 Daz Quesada, Enrique, 54, 56, 6566
Costales, Luis, 109 Daz Rodrguez, Rolando, 68
Coutant, Andr, 188 Daz Torres, Daniel, 10, 7879, 81, 261,
Craven, David, 445 278, 280, 321, 383, 418, 446, 457, 482
Crespo, Mario, 45152 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 1
Cruz, Vladimir, 466, 495 Diego, Constante, 418
Cueller, Yolanda, 346 Diegues, Carlos, 318
Cukor, George, 285 DLugo, Marvin, 4056, 437
Dolores de Martnez, Lolita. See del
Dalton, Roque, 14142, 210, 267 Rio, Dolores
Daney, Serge, 136 Donne, John, 464
Daro, Rubn, 6364 Dumas Alexandre, 268
Darwin, Charles, 46 Durn, Ciro, 20
Davies, Catherine, 13, 404, 406, 437, Durant, Alberto, 432
441, 45456 Dvorak, Anton, 285
Davis, Richard Harding, 39 Dylan, Bob, 264
Davison, Tito, 82
de Armas, Jess, 129 Eastman, George, 71
de Beauvoir, Simone, 7, 164 Eddy, Nelson, 51
Debray, Rgis, 142, 192, 267 Edwards, Jorge, 313
de Bry, Theodore, 4446 Eges, Rembert, 398
de Heredia, Jos, 268 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 262
de Landa, Juan, 82 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 128
de las Casas, Bartolom, 101 Eisenstein, Sergey M., 5, 99, 148, 270,
de la Torriente Brau, Pablo, 210 392, 408, 475
 532 Index

Eisler, Hanns, 171, 230, 232 French, Philip, 320, 329

Engels, Friedrich, 172 Fulbright, William (senator), 301
Escalante, Anibal, 167 Fulleda, Gerardo, 450
Espinosa. See Garca Espinosa, Julio Furmanov, Dmitir, 171
vora, Jos Antonio, 400
Gaitn, Jorge, 105
Fagen, Richard, 202 Galeano, Eduardo, 210
Faget, Puri, 279, 280 Galiano, Carlos, 425
Fairbanks, Douglas, 74 Gallo, Mario, 65
Fandio, Robert, 180, 313 Garca, Andy, 474
Fanon, Frantz, 268, 306 Garca, Federico, 432
Farias, Carlos, 225 Garca, Luis Alberto, 365, 455, 48384
Feijo, Samuel, 258 Garca, Sara, 80, 8485, 87
Felipe, Carlos, 440 Garca Ascot, Jos Miguel, 144, 357
Felix, Mara, 80, 277 Garca Borrero, Juan Antonio, 450, 452
Fellini, Federico, 5, 12, 178, 279, 397, 490 53, 482, 48485
Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo, 141, 24849, Garca Buchacha, Edith, 168, 172
267, 32526 Garca Canclini, Nstor, 170
Fernndez, Jos, 418 Garca Espinosa, Julio, 4, 6, 9, 1115, 17,
Fernndez, Joseito, 28688, 323, 476 22, 35, 87, 98, 10910, 11921, 12425,
Fernndez, Indio, 86 13031, 135, 142, 144, 15051, 153, 156,
Fernndez, Pablo Armando, 263 163, 168, 17174, 180, 182, 194, 213, 227,
Fernndez Retamar, Roberto, 141, 267, 247, 251, 258, 260, 3048, 317, 320, 322,
325, 326 327, 33234, 340, 34345, 35660, 370,
Fernndez-Santos, ngel, 473 372, 379, 39496, 401, 410, 41314,
Firk, Michle, 172 41516, 426, 428, 432, 434, 437, 439,
Fish, Stanley, 405 443, 448, 45761, 478, 483
Flaherty, Robert, 18485, 189 Garca Joya, Mario, 10, 281, 315, 341, 409,
Flaubert, Gustave, 277 420, 421
Fleitas, Miguel, 308 Garca Lorca, Federico, 6
Flynn, Errol, 86 Garca Mrquez, Gabriel, 14, 433
Foner, Philip, 40 Garca Menocal, Mario, 6667
Forns, Rosa, 412 Garca Mesa, Hctor, 132, 153, 176
Fornet, Ambrosio, 35, 59, 62, 124, 127, Garca Miranda, Nelson, 275
139, 313, 33435, 355, 358, 363, 366, 368, Garca Riera, Emilio, 8485
37172, 384, 481 Gardel, Carlos, 421
Fosse, Bob, 397 Garnett, Tay, 156
Fox, William, 82 Garvey, Marcus, 268
Fraga, Jorge, 6, 19, 144, 17475, 180, 199, Gatti, Armand, 179
201, 213, 238, 261, 273, 333, 341, 357, 362, Gelber, Jack, 298
364, 366, 368, 37071, 382, 409, 410 Getino, Octavio, 206, 212, 379
Francastel, Pierre, 216 Gide, Andr, 464
Francia, Aldo, 380 Gilbert, John, 82
Francisco, Ren, 446 Giral, Sergio, 7, 56, 58, 62, 164, 226, 321,
Franco, Jean, 64 327, 364, 36568, 382, 38889, 39899,
Franju, Georges, 185, 285 413, 45051
Franqui, Carlos, 7, 12224, 138 Godard, Jean-Luc, 164, 179, 397, 250, 280
Freire, Paulo, 141, 2089, 306 Goman, Erving, 399
 Index 533
Goldmann, Lucien, 191
Gmez, Gualberto, 102
Gmez, Manuel Octavio, 6, 49, 109, 164,
18182, 2012, 251, 25657, 261, 273,
281, 302, 312, 317, 33638, 34445, 356
57, 363, 366, 368, 390, 397, 433
Gmez, Mximo, 210, 27374, 3023 Habermas, Jrgen, 1314, 16, 495
Gmez, Sara, 8, 14, 204, 235, 306, 316,
319, 322, 332, 338, 34045, 351, 360,
36366, 4023, 405, 413
Gonzlez, Jos Antonio, 106
Gonzlez, Jos G., 41, 50
Gonzlez, Omar, 4
Gonzlez, Reynaldo, 390, 473
Gonzlez, Toms, 330
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 9, 428, 444, 459
Gorki, Maxim, 26
Goulart, Joo, 36
Goytisolo, Jos Agustn, 7
Goytisolo, Juan, 7
Grado, Juan Jos, 129
Gramatges, Harold, 106, 131
Granados, Daisy, 181, 294, 256, 358, 364,
365, 373, 391, 436, 481
Greenberg, Clement, 171
Greene, Graham, 54, 236
Grierson, John, 35, 185, 206
Grith, D. W., 66
Groulx, Gilles, 196
Guback, Thomas, 7677, 82
Guerra, Ruy, 36
Guevara, Alfredo, 25, 7, 9, 11, 15, 19, 22,
35, 90, 98, 1046, 109, 114, 119, 12125,
13138, 142, 151, 16364, 168, 17274,
176, 179, 192, 194, 218, 227, 370, 379,
388, 39495, 412, 457, 461, 481, 495
Guevara, Che, 5, 35, 119, 121, 142, 14546,
173, 192, 202, 210, 213, 220, 23132, 235,
24749, 268, 27175, 303, 311, 344, 370,
379, 426
Guilln, Nicols, 102
Gutirrez Alea, Toms, 1, 2, 5, 6, 1118,
20, 22, 35, 56, 92, 9798, 103, 109, 119,
123, 13031, 14447, 15761, 16465,
172, 175, 18688, 191, 194, 196, 202, 227,
25155, 258, 26162, 267, 281, 288,
29091, 29396, 300302, 312, 31516, Ichazo, Francisco, 87, 110
323, 327, 32930, 34041, 345, 35657,
360, 365, 368, 370, 383, 38990, 40212,
419, 422, 429, 433, 43839, 442, 447,
45657, 463, 466, 47078, 482, 495
Guzmn, Patricio, 381, 383, 432
Habel, Janette, 445
Halperin, Maurice, 178
Hardy, Oliver, 252
Harlan, Richard, 84
Harlow, Jean, 283
Harris, Wilson, 268
Hart, Armando, 12, 35, 369
Has, Wojciech, 279
Haubenstock-Ramati, Roman, 171
Haya, Mara Eugenia, 330
Haya de la Torre, Vctor Ral, 99
Haydu, Jorge, 181
Hearst, William Randolph, 3840
Hearteld, John, 270
Hegel, G. W. F., 191, 208
Hemingway, Ernest, 145, 196
Heras Len, Eduardo, 14446, 155
Hernndez, Bernab, 273, 317, 318
Hernndez, Eugenio, 434, 450
Hernndez, Rafael, 20, 447, 487
Hernndez Artigas, J., 153
Herrera, Jorge, 10, 19, 181, 281
Herrera, Manuel, 49, 247, 262, 281, 344,
367, 372, 433
Herrera y Reissig, Julio, 64
Hess, John, 13, 1516, 332, 337, 339, 340,
345, 464, 466, 469, 47071, 473, 495
Hill, George, 82
Hitchcock, Alfred, 252
Hobbes, Thomas, 47
Hobsbawm, Eric, 42728
Ho Chi Minh, 24344
Hood, Stuart, 233, 237
Horne, Lena, 219
Hornedo y Salas, 72
Huberman, Leo, 120
Huillet, Danielle, 397
Ibarra, Mirta, 2, 364, 406, 451, 456, 468,
469, 477, 481
Ilf, Ilya, 160
 534 Index

Iron Buttery, 244 Lecuona, Ernesto, 465

Ivens, Joris, 110, 18485, 196203, 230, Leduc, Paul, 20, 383
250 Legr, Adela, 256, 286
Lelouch, Claude, 410
James, C. L. R., 266, 268, 307 Lemmon, Jack, 9, 378, 416
Jameson, Fredric, 14, 216, 391, 471 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 30, 71, 171, 172
Jara, Vctor, 310 Len Fras, Isaac, 277, 285, 309
Jennings, Humphrey, 185, 221 Lesage, Julia, 345
Jimnez Leal, Orlando, 133 Lewis, Jerry, 252, 254
Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 219, 229, Lezama Lima, Jos, 164, 464
23334 Littin, Miguel, 381, 432
Jonson, Ben, 85 Llano, Eduardo del, 21
Joyce, James, 171 Llaurad, Adolfo, 256, 286, 373, 483
Juantorena, Alberto, 419 Lloyd, Harold, 252
Lpez, Rigoberto, 345
Kadar, Jan, 250 Lpez Moctezuma, Carlos, 80
Kalatozov, Mikhail, 166 Lpez Oliva, Manuel, 234, 235
Kaplan, Ann, 345 Lpez Segrera, Francisco, 57
Karmen, Roman, 232 Lorca. See Garca Lorca, Federico
Karol, K. S., 171, 179, 193 Lotman, Yuri, 426
Kawalerowicz, Jerzy, 279 Lugones, Leopoldo, 64
Kazan, Elia, 285 Lugosi, Bela, 82
Keaton, Buster, 252 Lukcs, Georg, 391
Kennedy, Robert, 234 Lumsden, Ian, 464, 472, 474
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 234 Lunacacharsky, Anatoly, 30
Khrushchev, Nikita, 128, 171 Lynn, Vernica, 420
Kid Chocolate, 419
King, Henry, 86 Maceo, Antonio, 102, 273, 275
King, John, 358, 417, 436 Machado, Gerardo, 105
King, Martin Luther, 219, 233 MacLaine, Shirley, 397
Klapper, Joseph, 264 Maetzig, Kurt, 166
Klimov, Elem, 428 Mahieu, Jos Agustn, 72
Klos, Elmar, 250 Makeba, Miriam, 322
Korda, Alberto, 24849 Maldonado, Eduardo, 209
Kovacs, Stephen, 27778, 28082, 285 Malle, Louis, 164
Kubitschek, Juscelino, 36 Mandela, Winnie, 414
Kubrick, Stanley, 432 Manet, Eduardo, 12930, 179, 180, 397
Kuhn, Annette, 345 Mangano, Silvana, 156
Kuleshev, Lev, 109 Mann, Thomas, 171
Kurosawa, Akira, 178, 274, 279 Maritegui, Jos Carlos, 57, 61, 63, 95
Marinello, Juan, 1012, 107
Lafargue, Paul, 428 Marker, Chris, 193, 203, 250
Lam, Wilfredo, 364 Martelli, Otello, 144, 147
Lamming, George, 325, 327 Mart, Jos, 6, 19, 117, 131, 210, 229, 238,
Laurel, Stan, 252 254, 310, 312, 31415, 317, 323, 327,
Leacock, Richard, 189, 19293 447, 464
Leante, Csar, 210 Martin, Lionel, 110
Leconte de Lisle, 268 Martnez Illas, Manuel, 56
 Index 535

Martnez Villena, Rubn, 101 Ortz, Fernando, 315

Marx, Karl, 172, 191 Otero, Lisandro, 172, 312
Massip, Jos, 6, 109, 119, 131, 153, 181,
19899, 201, 204, 227, 23637, 251, Pabst, G. W., 397
26162, 308, 312, 314 Padilla, Heberto, 7, 312, 313
Matamoros, Tro, 70, 320 Padmore, George, 268
Matthews, Herbert, 11314 Padrn, Jos, 431, 432
Mature, Victor, 86 Padrn, Juan, 35859, 435
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 167 Pais, Frank, 249, 251
Mayito. See Garca Joya, Mario Pantin, Estrella, 213
McLuhan, Marshall, 112, 397 Paranagua, Paulo Antonio, 390, 393,
Mlis, Georges, 41, 65 425, 434, 44042, 450, 454
Mella, Julio Antonio, 9899, 104, 367 Paredes, Maria, 9
Mench, Rigoberta, 414 Pars, Rogelio, 334, 359, 367, 379
Mendive, Manuel, 364 Paz, Senel, 2, 454, 463, 46768, 473
Messiaen, Olivier, 171 Peckinpah, Sam, 383
Milans, Pablo, 7, 265, 468 Pelez, Amelia, 123
Mills, C. Wright, 139 Penn, Arthur, 9
Miravalles, Reynaldo, 459, 460 Pen, Ramn, 8385
Mizoguchi, Kenji, 275 Perdomo, Leopoldo, 338
Molina, Ral, 180 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson, 36, 318
Molinaro, Edouard, 164 Prez, Fernando, 17, 22, 111, 338, 383, 412,
Monroe, Marilyn, 414 430, 449, 482, 484, 488, 490
Montaigne, 326 Prez, Manuel, 2, 8, 109, 164, 273, 332,
Mora, Blas, 156 33435, 359, 367, 410, 413, 429, 45961
Mor, Benny, 70, 232, 321 Prez Betancourt, Rolando, 399, 419,
Morello, Tita, 80 430, 440, 442
Moreno, Adriano, 385 Prez Nieto, Luisa, 442
Morin, Edgar, 19091, 250 Prez Prado, 232
Mosquera, Gerardo, 446 Prez Sarduy, Pedro, 134, 135, 137
Mota, Francisco, 87 Prez Ureta, Ral, 442, 479, 492
Mraz, John, 28385, 28788 Pern, Juan, 105
Muoz, Eduardo, 129 Perse, Saint-John, 268
Murphy, George, 156 Perugorra, Jorge, 464, 477, 483
Myerson, Michael, 285, 289, 300 Petrov, Eugene, 160
Piard, Toms, 415, 482
Nabori, Indio, 117 Pick, Zuzana, 4037, 451, 452
Napoles, Ivan, 335 Pickford, Mary, 74
Nervo, Amado, 63 Piedra, Mario, 203
Nicola, Noel, 265 Pierpont, Morgan J., 113
Nixon, Richard, 120, 301 Pineda Barnet, Enrique, 13, 98, 12829,
Nogueras, Luis Rogelio, 387 166, 24951, 261, 367, 372, 410, 433
Nolan, Lloyd, 156 Pino Santos, scar, 87
Nono, Luigi, 171, 225 Piscator, Erwin, 250
Nez, Eslinda, 294, 402 Platt, Orville (senator), 51
Pollack, Sydney, 9
Olmi, Ermanno, 9 Pon Juan, Eduardo, 446
Orodea, Miguel, 22728 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 9
 536 Index
Portocarrero, Ren, 171
Portuondo, Jos Antonio, 107
Portuondo, Omara, 421, 492
Pousseur, Henri, 171
Preminger, Otto, 250
Prvert, Jacques, 203
Prieto, Abel, 2
Pro, Carlos, 86, 87
Prochazka, Jan, 166
Procua, Luis, 98
Pudovkin, V. I., 109, 148
Puig, Germn, 122
Pulitzer, Joseph, 38, 39, 41
Quiros, Oscar, 1315
Rabal, Francisco, 433
Rappenneau, Jean-Paul, 253
Redford, Robert, 416, 453
Reede, Harry, 129
Reisz, Karel, 18586
Renoir, Jean, 81, 153
Rentera, Pedro, 434
Resnais, Alain, 164, 185, 280
Revuelta, Raquel, 277
Revueltas, Jos, 286
Richardson, Tony, 178, 186
Rios, Santiago, 481
Rios, Teodoro, 481
Rivera, Diego, 139, 269, 270
Roa, Ral, 105, 210
Roca, Blas, 179
Rocha, Glauber, 280, 318, 475
Rockefeller, Nelson, 104
Rod, Juan, 327
Rodrigues, Jos, 365
Rodrguez, Ana, 45152
Rodrguez, Carlos Rafael, 107, 461
Rodrguez, Jos, 315
Rodrguez, Jos Manuel, 449
Rodrguez, Marta, 217
Rodrguez, Nelson, 109
Rodrguez, Silvio, 243, 245, 265
Rodrguez Alemn, Mario, 393
Rodrguez and Prez, 92
Rogosin, Lionel, 133
Roguera Saumell, Manuel, 256
Roig, Gonzalo, 394
Rojas, Orlando, 9, 412, 417, 440, 44243,
480, 482, 483
Roldn, Alberto, 180, 313
Roldn, Amadeo, 103
Romain, Jacques, 157
Roosevelt, Theodore, 38, 42, 54
Rosi, Francesco, 250
Rossellini, Roberto, 147
Rossini, Gioacchino, 223
Rouch, Jean, 18892, 195, 250
Runelli, Jorge, 4067
Ruiz, Ral, 38081
Russell, Ken, 134
Saderman, Alejandro, 235, 273
Sadoul, George, 83, 109, 379
Salkey, Andrew, 265, 268
Snchez Vsquez, Adolfo, 173, 269, 270
Sanjins, Jorge, 381, 397
Santos, Isabel, 420, 45556
Santos y Artiga, 70, 92
Sarno, Geraldo, 382
Sarris, Andrew, 175, 300301
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7, 117, 12628, 137,
13839, 205
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 216
Schiller, Herbert, 415
Schneider, Ren, 310
Schoenberg, Arnold, 171
Schreyer, Wolfgang, 166
Schumann, Peter, 358, 373, 388, 41011
Schweitzer, Albert, 266
Seabury, William Marston, 7273, 75
Seeger, Pete, 323
Segovia, Andrs, 70
Segura, Mayra, 451
Semprn, Jorge, 7
Sennet, Mack, 160
Shklovsky, Victor, 410
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 171
Silva, Jorge, 207, 217
Silva, Jos Asuncin, 64
Silverman, Bertram, 22021
Simons, Moiss, 224
Smith, Albert E., 38, 4144, 4749, 65
Solanas, Fernando, 206, 212, 379
 Index 537

Sols, Humberto, 48, 1314, 16465, Truaut, Franois, 164, 285

251, 25556, 261, 27577, 27982, 285, Trujillo, Marisol, 414
314, 316, 328, 35657, 363, 365, 367, 388,
39094, 4012, 413, 42931, 442, 446, Ulive, Ugo, 130, 134, 137, 153, 16566, 172,
451, 46162, 483, 490 179, 180
Soler Puig, Jos, 166 Urrutia, Manuel, 120
Sommereld, Stanley, 300301
Sontag, Susan, 7, 45, 54 Vadim, Roger, 164
Sotto, Arturo, 12, 482, 484, 489 Valds, Beatriz, 420, 433, 483
Stal, Madame de, 62 Valds, Oscar, 54, 165, 322, 334, 347, 367
Stanislavski, Konstantin, 250 Valds, Thais, 436, 45557
Stock, Anne Marie, 49192 Valds Rodrguez, J. M., 54, 66, 86, 99,
Stockhausen, Karl Heinz, 171 100, 104
Storck, Henri, 110 Valdez, Oscar, 235
Straub, Jean-Marie, 397 Valenti, Jack, 474
Stravinsky, Igor, 103 Valera, Roberto, 315
Stubbs, Jean, 364 Varda, Agnes, 341
Sturges, John, 86 Varela, Flix, 447
Surez, Ramn, 10, 122, 180, 199 Varse, Edgar, 103
Surez y Romero, Anselmo, 58 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 7, 465
Sweezy, Paul, 120 Vsquez Daz, Ren, 467
Vzquez Montalbn, Manuel, 2, 5
Tabo, Jos, 103 Vega, Pastor, 8, 34, 38, 48, 212, 215, 219,
Tabo, Juan Carlos, 1, 2, 9, 10, 22, 322, 221, 225, 227, 236, 308, 35859, 367,
366, 41012, 43639, 456, 463, 474, 373, 375, 37778, 410, 433, 480, 482
476, 482, 489, 494 Veitia, Hctor, 327, 451
Tablada, Carlos, 427 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 309
Talavera, Miriam, 409 Vliz, Claudio, 58
Tao, Tony, 255 Velo, Carlos, 98
Taylor, Anna Marie, 259, 260, 278, 285, Vergara, Tet, 257
288 Vertov, Dziga, 30, 184, 19091, 22728,
Taylor, Robert, 156 270
Tejada, Mario, 202 Veyre, Gabriel, 47
Thompson, E. P., 46, 321 Vilass, Mayra, 414, 451
Titn. See Gutirrez Alea, Toms Villagra, Nelson, 335, 381
Togliatti, Palmiro, 109 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 232
Torrado, Norma, 109 Villaras, Carlos, 82
Torres, Camilo, 310 Villaverde, Cirilo, 328, 388, 39093
Torres, Miguel, 96, 410, 411 Villaverde, Fernando, 165, 179, 180, 313
Torres, scar, 13031, 157 Villoch, Federico, 65
Toti, Gianni, 298 Vias, David, 298
Tovar, Lupita, 82 Visconti, Luccino, 250, 279, 39293,
Trewey, Flicien, 47 430
Triana, Jorge Al, 421, 432 Vitier, Sergio, 265
Trinchet, Jorge, 420 Volont, Gian Maria, 9, 419
Tr, Emilio, 112 von Homan, Nicholas, 301
Trotsky, Leon, 139, 142, 269 Vroman, Adam Clark, 54
 538 Index
Walken, Christopher, 416
Walsh, Rodolfo, 210
Watkins, Peter, 304
Waugh, Tom, 200
Wayne, Mike, 47576
Webern, Anton, 171
Weill, Kurt, 270, 397
Welles, Orson, 38, 280
West, Dennis, 33031
Wilde, Oscar, 464
Wilkinson, Steve, 467
Williams, Treat, 416
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26
Wollaston, Nicholas, 13436, 138
Ynez, Santiago, 479, 489
Yeln, Sal, 169, 197
Yevtushenko, Yevgeni, 16667
Yglesias, Jorge, 463, 46566
Zavattini, Cesare, 144, 151, 153
Zinneman, Fred, 86
Zorrilla, Jos, 261
Michael Chanan is professor of cultural and media studies at the Univer-
sity of the West of England, Bristol. He has written, edited, and trans-
lated books and articles on lm and music, including The Dream That
Kicks, on the invention and early years of cinema in Britain, Musica
Practica and From Handel to Hendrix on the social history of music,
and Repeated Takes, a history of recording. He is also a documentary
lmmaker and taught lmmaking for many years in London.